Words by Smiley Team
For more than a decade, Compare and Recycle has been facilitating mobile phone and tech recycling – and in 2021 alone, they prevented more than 26 tonnes of mobile phones from becoming waste.
Current statistics suggest we upgrade or replace our phones roughly every two years, and the average human life expectancy in the UK is 81 years. This means each British consumer will own 35 phones in their lifetime.
Antonia Alexeyeva, from Compare and Recycle, tells Smiley News: “Mobile phones require a myriad of valuable materials to work. This includes silicon, carbon, calcium, coltan, iron, gold, copper, nickel, tin and aluminium among others.
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“Mining these virgin materials has a devastating impact on the environment," she says. "Natural habitat destruction, the contamination of water and soil puts workers' and local communities' lives in danger. Ore grade is decreasing, which leads to mines becoming wider and deeper, labour cost increasing, working conditions lacking safety and the cost per kg of minerals going up, all of which creates huge price tags for our phones.
“On top of that, due to higher electronics consumption, limited repairs availability and shorter life cycles of tech items, electronic waste is rapidly growing and in 2021 it was estimated to be 57.4 million tonnes. That’s enough to bury Hyde Park with the pile being 1.34 times taller than the Shard!"
She adds: "When it comes to mobile phones, keeping valuable and rare metals in circulation is an excellent way to save our planet.”
Compare and Recycle is on a mission to help customers make the most of their phones. They make the process of recycling old phones easy by enabling customers to compare a wide range of different recycling companies on the market both in the UK and abroad.
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As well as the issue of e-waste, there's also the problem of CO2 emissions. Every year, an increasing number of smartphones are created to meet the frenetic demand - but you can do your part for the environment and recycle your phone.
Antonia adds: “Regretfully, lack of awareness on the environmental impact of smartphones, and technology in general, is widespread.
“This is not because consumers choose to ignore it though, on the contrary, the information on how and where the smartphones are produced, what materials are used to make them is limited and only select manufacturers report on carbon emissions of their products.”
Compare and Recycle recommend buying refurbished handsets, as this is a great way to reduce the environmental impact of the smartphone industry. It reduces the demand for a new smartphone to be manufactured, which has the harmful effect of creating more CO2 emissions, and perfectly functioning smartphones get left to become hazardous e-waste.
You can find out more at compareandrecycle.co.uk.
