Old Cell Phones Don't Die....

Nor do they fade away.

A year or so ago, the battery in my perfectly good cell phone died. When I went to replace the battery, I was informed that I had to replace the phone. Grrrrrr.

My sister Kath had a worse experience: she was told that she nad to get a new phone or start paying more, because they her provider no longer wanted to support the crappy old tech phones.

It's not as if either of these phones were rotary dial, black Bakelite relics from the 1950's.

They were relatively new, still working phones.

But, oh, that built in obsolescence.

When I got my newbie, I gave Verizon my old faithful, with some vague notion that they were going to refurbish it and give it to a soldier in Iraq (who would no doubt disdain the clunky low-tech-ness of ) or to someone in the third world (ditto).

But I have often wondered where old cell phones really go and now, thanks to the Technology Review (MIT Alumnae Magazine, September - October 2008), I know where at least a goodly number of them go. And I know that there's an awfully goodly - even ungodly number - in the potential re-use bin: the article I read on recycling cell phones noted a Gartner fast-fact that over half a billion cell phones were traded in during 2007. (Mine was  -unwillingly - one of them.)

The place where a goodly number of cell phones go is a company called ReCellular, in Dexter, Michigan. Since I had visions of heaps of cell phones washing up on the shores of Bangladesh where gleaners worked them over for 14  cents an hour, I'm actually happy to learn that phones that get born somewhere else actually get reborn in the USA.

ReCellular, "the world's largest recycler and reseller of used cellular phones and accessories."  refurbishes used phones - doing some on their own, and farming out less popular models to other companies in both the US and abroad.  The cell phones head back into circulation. The article didn't state how and where, ReCellular - which, in addition to it's clever name, has a a clever motto: Hello Again - has:

...long-standing relationships with key industry players such as Verizon Wireless, Motorola, Sprint and Best Buy (to name a few).

I've never noticed used phones for sale at Verizon, but I may not have been paying all that much attention. (I just hope I haven't unknowingly purchased one.)

All I can say is that, given that the old timers like the one I surrendered a year ago aren't supported by the phone service providers, there must be an awful lot of folks giving up cell phones that are far more current than the sucker that was pried out of my grip.

Phones that can't be refurbished by ReCellular are recycled at Sims Recycling Solutions  - and isn't everything a solution these days? - a smelter outside of Chicago.

Sims, which processes 30,000 pounds of cell phones a month - an awful lot of phones, given that I just weighed mine on a postage scale and it's 3.5 ounces. They shred them, incinerate the plastic, and save the residual gunk, which breaks down into a couple of alloys. Slag, which is largely silica, gets recycled for use in "shingles and road construction". What's left is cooled into bars and passed on to other companies, which extract the precious metals contained within: "80 ounces of silver, eight ounces of gold, and three ounces of palladium [can be recovered] from a ton of cell phones.

Well, I for one am happy that all these cell phones are being recycled rather than ending up in suppurating, poisonous landfills.

And who'd thunk that there's palladium in them thar' phones?