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LESS THAN 1% OF USED CELL PHONES RECOVERED BY LEADING U.S. PHONE COLLECTION PROGRAMS -- MILLIONS GO TO LANDFILLS OR INCINERATORS

New Study Recommends Ways to Make Cell Phone Collection, Reuse and Recycling Effective to Reduce Toxic Waste and Make Money

new report by the national environmental research organization INFORM, Calling All Cell Phones: Collection, Reuse and Recycling Programs in the US, reveals that leading cell phone collection programs have recovered less than 1 percent of phones retired and discarded since 1999. Approximately 2.5 million phones were collected from 1999 to early 2003 by the programs studied, leaving hundreds of millions more to enter the waste stream.

Calling All Cell Phones' research indicates an estimated 100 million cell phones, weighing approximately 50,000 tons, will be retired this year alone. An additional surge in this toxic waste flow is expected to follow the cell phone number portability rule (effective today) as millions of consumers change wireless services and discard their incompatible cell phones.

Cell phone collection programs are the focus of this new report because INFORM found them to be the primary strategy in the US for dealing with the rapidly escalating cell phone waste problem researched in its groundbreaking 2002 report, Waste in the Wireless World. "At current rates of recovery, hundreds of millions of used cell phones will soon wind up in landfills or incinerators where they'll release arsenic, lead, cadmium, and many other toxic materials that threaten human health and the environment," said Eric Most, author of the new report. "Existing US collection programs are making steps in the right direction, but they're operating at a scale and scope that is dwarfed by the monumental size of the problem

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