What do you do after you trade in your old phone? If you are one of the responsible people who sell it or recycle it then good for you. But according to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, most cell phones that are permanently turned off are lost in drawers, closets and garages, or end up in bins, landfills, or incinerated.

And when you consider that an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones will go to waste in 2022 alone, what you do with your devices really matters.

urine An international non-profit organization dedicated to the collection and recycling of electrical and electronic waste gave a speech ahead of International E-Waste Day on Friday, October 14th. To highlight the importance of recycling small appliances, this year’s E-Waste Day motto is: “Recycle anything, no matter how small.”

WEEE CEO Pascal Leroy said this year the campaign focused on small items because “they are not used in homes and they accumulate very easily unnoticed or end up in normal waste. People often don’t realize that all these seemingly insignificant items are of great value and together make up enormous amounts on a global level.”

Indeed, to help people better understand this staggering 5.3 billion number, WEEE claims that if phones had an average depth of 9mm and were placed flat on top of each other, the stack would rise 31,000 miles (roughly 50,000 kilometers). It’s 120 times larger than the International Space Station and one-eighth the way to the moon.

The advantage of recycling cell phones and other electronic devices is that it gives manufacturers access to their non-renewable natural resources such as gold, copper, silver and palladium and other components that can be reused in new products.

To find out why so many people keep their old devices instead of recycling or repairing them, WEEE surveyed 8,775 households in six European countries this year. The most common reasons for keeping old gadgets were:

– I can use it again in the future (46%)
– I plan to sell/give (15%)
– Has spiritual value (13%)
– May have value in the future (9%)
– I don’t know how to destroy (7%)

Keeping them in a drawer is one thing. But throwing old tools away is an even bigger problem because it creates a huge amount of unnecessary waste that requires energy and resources to process. Source