Anyone Seen My Phone?

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday July 17, 2007

Steve Dow

Recycle or resell? Steve Dow looks at the fate of unwanted mobiles.

When the time comes to upgrade your mobile phone, which Australians do on average every 18 months to two years, you have several choices: recycle the old one, donate it to charity for resale overseas or toss it in the rubbish to add to the planet's groaning weight of landfill.

But most people are choosing a fourth option: hiding the old mobile phone in a cupboard or desk drawer as though a family member might somehow put it to use in future. It's doubtful they will, as new phones with video calling, MP3 music players, cameras and even GPS become standard and rapidly supersede more basic handsets.

By March the industry body the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association collected 419 tonnes of old phone handsets, batteries and accessories through its Mobile Muster scheme, which started in 1999. However, while that figure sounds impressive, only 4 per cent of Australians report recycling their last superceded mobile handset.

The association's latest study confirms our recycling of mobile phones is stagnant, despite a record two-thirds of owners now being aware they can drop off a phone for recycling at all Telstra, Virgin, Crazy John's, Optus, 3, Fone Zone and Vodafone stores and ANZ Bank branches. It seems we're too lazy or indifferent to bother, or else have become sentimental about old gadgets as keepsakes.

Australians who report donating their phone to charity fell from 2 per cent of mobile users in 2005 to 1 per cent this year. Most people say they're keeping the old phone at home or in the office, or occasionally passing them onto friends or family.

Only 12 per cent have ever recycled any part of a mobile phone, the latest study found. And yet the true recycling rate for handsets is probably more like 5 per cent: in 2005, it was estimated 1.5 million had been recycled out of 30 million mobile phones shipped into Australia to that date. The association says 2.45 million mobile phones have been recycled in Australia, but last year a record 8.7 million new phones were shipped into the country. Thus almost 40 million new phones have been brought into Australia, with perhaps one in eight new mobile phones redirected for overseas sale.

One good sign: people who admit throwing their phones into landfill fell from 9 per cent to 2.9 per cent between the 2005 survey and this year's, but a more precise estimate of how many mobile phones are tossed into landfill is needed.

Is Mobile Muster's recycling manager, Rose Read, happy with progress? "We're committed to increasing recycling rates and we want to get them up higher," Read says. "We haven't set a particular recovery rate per se, because we're still trying to understand people's desire to hang onto phones and to work out what is a reasonable target, based on consumer behaviour."

It's a curious response from Mobile Muster, given that nearly two years ago, in September 2005, the then NSW Department of Environment and Conservation issued a report by the Extended Producer Responsibility Group criticising Australia's mobile phone industry for "not operating effectively" its recycling scheme.

"The collection and participation rates are very low, indicating that much more must be done by industry to capture used mobile phones," the report said.

Read responds: "The Mobile Muster campaign is now having a good impact: people are hanging onto their phones and do want to do the right thing, and know they shouldn't throw them in the bin. The first priority is to stop it ending up in landfill."

And yet still no recovery targets? "Our target at the moment is to increase our collections by 200 per cent from 2005 to 2008, that's our short-term target," Read says. "We want to continue that rate of increase over the next five years, about 100 per cent per year." More than 90 per cent of a mobile phone is recycled, Read says. "We're 100 per cent up on handset numbers [in March] on the previous year."

But why doesn't the Australian mobile phone industry also offer a refurbishing service to resell mobile phones on the domestic or overseas markets, or both? That is "already happening" under the direction of other companies, Read says. Besides, reuse "happens quite a lot anyway".

Indeed, charities earn $3 to $5 for each handset they send to a Melbourne company, Aussie Recycling Program. The company refurbishes the phones for second-hand markets in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Steve Moss, the managing director, who founded the company in 2003, says the industry recycling scheme should also be refurbishing mobile phones. "Why do you think Mobile Muster destroys their handsets?" Moss says. "Because it's a better environmental option? No, because it's not.

"They destroy their handsets because it's not in their commercial interest [to keep them circulating]. Who pays Mobile Muster's bills? The manufacturers do."

Moss questions whether Mobile Muster's recycling figures include surplus unsold phones.

More critically, Moss says, there is not enough incentive for consumers to recycle their handsets. "Consumers need a call to action," he says. "Perhaps a monetary incentive. Unfortunately, as Gordon Gekko [in the 1987 film Wall Street] said, 'Greed ... is good'; everyone thinks about himself or herself.

"So you go to a consumer and say, 'Hey, please go recycle your handset'. Sure, there's an environmental aspect of it, but a high percentage of people would just not bother to go into a store and recycle their phone. We offer an alternative: we can post out a satchel for people to return their phone, which is so much more convenient."

Moss, the son of immigrants from Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, came to Australia at the age of six in 1977. By 1995 the former sugar and cement commodities trader had carved a niche trading new and used computers and mobile phones, giving him worldwide trading contacts. "I thought, 'All these things are going to landfill; this couldn't possibly be good for the environment.' "

Today, Aussie Recycling Program refurbishes about 75 per cent of the mobile phones sent by charities for resale, although Moss declines to give exact figures.

The phones once owned by Australians are resold in Africa, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Pakistan and even the US. The phones are refurbished in the company's factories in Melbourne and Hong Kong.

But Mobile Muster's Read expresses reservations about sending refurbished mobile phones overseas. "There's no guarantee those phones will not [eventually] end up in landfill," she says. "We want to make sure we know what happens to the phones. To sell them offshore is not appropriate for the industry association because we can't guarantee they will necessarily be recycled. The quality and control of landfills and recycling processes in non-OECD countries is varied, to say the least."

So when Moss sends his phones for sale overseas, how does he know what their fate will be? "It's a good question. Are we shifting waste overseas?" he says. "First, mobile phones are not a waste product as long as they're working. And second, why isn't the same question asked of new phones?"

But doesn't sending refurbished phones from Australia to the likes of African and Eastern Bloc countries simply delay dumping in landfill? "I don't think so, because they're being sent for reuse," Moss says.

"A lot of people in those countries would hang onto the phone a lot longer than we would here. We are developing distribution centres in those countries [with recycling programs] but for it to be effective and economically viable, we need to collect as many phones [in Australia] as possible to establish take-back programs. At the moment we're collecting only minute quantities."

As one example, Moss says he is considering working with European refurbished mobile phone exporters on setting up a recycling scheme in Nigeria.

Wouldn't the answer be to refuse to export phones to those countries that lack good recycling schemes? "But even the United Nations says not to ignore developing countries; [exporting phones there] adds a lot of benefit to them," Moss says. "The amount of benefit that mobile telecommunications provides to developing countries is just too great to be ignored. It develops new businesses as well."

Is there anything that prevents Moss's company selling its refurbished phones in Australia? "Nothing's stopping us, but it gets down to the quality and the quantity of handsets we get, and also we shouldn't forget about the backend benefit we can provide to developing countries. We're trying to breach the [global] digital divide."

Would Australians turn up their nose at a second-hand phone? "Perhaps that's right, because we're one of the leaders in taking new technology on," Moss says. "Not only do we upgrade our phones every 18 to 24 months, but people upgrade their prepaid phones every eight months. Why do they do that? Because they get a new handset with all the bells and whistles and it's so cheap."

THE MOBILE AFTERLIFE

* Mobile Muster sends mobile phones to MRI Recycling in Melbourne, which breaks them down; it had handled 419 tonnes from 1999 up to March this year. An Australian company shreds plastic cases for use as plastic pellets and fence posts. MRI, which has an export licence under the federal Hazardous Waste Act to comply with the Basel Convention on hazardous waste exports, ships the dismantled phone parts to South Korea. One company, Reco, near Seoul, strips the circuit boards for gold, silver, lead and copper for resale. Another company, Kobar, outside the city of Busan, processes the phone batteries for cadmium for use in new batteries and nickel for use in stainless steel. For your nearest Mobile Muster location, you can enter your postcode at www.mobilemuster.com.au or phone 1300 730 070.

* Charities such as the NSW Spastic Centre get $3 to $5 for each handset sent to the Aussie Recycling Program in Melbourne, which refurbishes phones for reuse in Asian and Eastern European countries. Phones that can't be refurbished - about six tonnes to date - go to MRI Recycling for breaking down under the Mobile Muster program. Call the Spastic Centre on 1800 004 364 and a freepost satchel will be sent to you, or check the program's website at www.arp.net.au for other charities that could benefit from your phone donation, such as Apex, the Red Cross and Lifeline.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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