National cell phone recycling week starts Monday

Dubai: People typically have five mobile phones cluttering up drawers waiting to be resold or just left to collect dust, but now Nokia has extended its recycling scheme to the UAE to give old phones a purpose.

Recycling boxes will be available across the UAE for people to drop their old and unwanted phones into and collect a voucher to download music from Nokia in return.

The phones will be sent to Europe to be taken apart and recycled by 10 Nokia approved companies with 80 centres between them.

According to Mia Ranta-aho, senior Environmental manager, at Nokia Middle East and Africa, 1 billion people use Nokia phones worldwide.

"If each of the three billion people globally owning mobiles brought back just one unused device we could save 240,000 tones of raw materials and reduce greenhouse gases to the same effect as taking four million cars off the road."

Around 80 per cent of a mobile phone can be recycled with plastics, precious metals and pollutants being reused to make new phones.

“Using the best recycling technology nothing is wasted. Between 65–80 per cent of a Nokia device can be recycled. Plastics that can’t be recycled are burnt to provide energy for the recycling process, and other materials are ground up into chips and used as construction materials or for building roads. In this way nothing has to go to landfill,” added Mia Ranta-aho.

A move is on to get the 90 percent of cell phone users who just throw their old phones away to recycle them.

The Environmental Protection Agency and its e-cycling (electronics recycling) partners have dubbed the week of April 6-12 as National Cell Phone Recycling Week, building momentum for Earth Day on April 22.

To help consumers recycle their old cell phones, major retailers and service providers will have drop-off site in their stores, and cell phone makers and service providers are also taking in old cell phones, PDAs, cell phone batteries, chargers and other accessories by mail.

Stores taking part in cell phone recycling include AT&T, Best Buy, Office Depot, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Staples, T-Mobile, LG Electronics and Verizon Wireless.