Good smartphones are now cheap, which means good smartphones are now disposable. The Honor 5X is a quality $200 phablet from Huawei. According to the EPA, some 130 million smartphones are added to landfills every year. The lead, mercury, cadmium and other scary-sounding internal ingredients found inside can leak into groundwater and eventually find their way back into your mouth via the food chain.
We’re not just throwing away quality handsets, but also perfectly usable quality handsets, which can turn around and be resold. But even an old iPhone with a cracked screen and dead battery still has use. Again, according to the EPA, every million smartphones recycled in the US results in 35,000 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium. So whether intended for reuse, or set for recycling, don’t ever just throw your smartphone away.
Donate Your Smartphone to a Good Cause
A growing variety of nonprofit organizations are more than willing to take your old smartphone off your hands and put it to significantly better use than it would see in a landfill. Here are just a few suggestions.
Cell Phones for Soldiers is a nonprofit agency that’ll take your old mobile device (including flip phones, smartphones, tablets, even MP3 players) off your hands. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t send these devices to soldiers in the field – instead, they recycle these devices for money and channel your donation into prepaid international calling cards that soldiers can use to place calls to family and friends while they’re deployed. They’ll even offer to send you a shipping label, and your donation is tax deductible. The Cell Phones for Soldiers website specifies the need for “gently used” devices, so if you’re looking to get rid of an old iPhone with a cracked screen, this may not be the best option for you.
Read the full story at http://www.notebookreview.com/howto/how-to-buy-a-smartphone-recycling-old-cell-phones/.