Phone Recycling – Not Enough Being Done
Today, Alltel announced the expansion of their mobile phone recycling program to 500 retail locations. While this is good news, especially the fact that Alltel collected 70k phones in October alone, we have to wonder why it’s “news” that carriers are doing something so simple as putting old phone drop boxes in their retail locations. Simply put: No cellular phone retail location should fail to have a mobile phone recycling drop-box. Individually, old phones are junk, worth zero, and add to pollution. But aggregated by a collection program, they have value in secondary markets. We have written about this before, and about how California now has a Law requiring cell-phone recycling. The only problem with the CA law is that a surcharge is put on new phones, and we think the recycling program could fund itself.
