Mobile phone recycling saves resources and benefits the environment

Recycling mobile phones helps protect the environment as well as save expensive and rare resources. Thanks to innovative technologies, up to 80 percent of the materials in used phones, including precious metals such as gold and silver, can be recycled. Correct recycling helps the environment in two ways: it allows valuable raw materials to be retrieved and also prevents mobile phones from damaging the environment with harmful substances when disposed of in household waste.

Mobile phones are an important source of raw materials

Every old mobile phone contains a small treasure of increasingly scarce and valuable raw materials: gold, so-called rare earths, copper and metals such as palladium. In Germany alone, the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom) estimates that people store around 72 million mobiles that are no longer used. Innovative technologies, however, allow the re-use of up to 80 percent of the raw materials in mobile phones.

The StEP initiative (Solving the E-Waste Problem) works on an international level to prevent electronic waste from ending up in third-world countries. It has calculated that one million old mobile phones contain about 24 kg gold, 250 kg silver, 9 kg palladium and 9 tons of copper. Far too often, such valuable resources are dumped in the rubbish or find their way as electronic waste to waste disposal sites in developing countries.

Researchers develop more efficient recycling methods

Researchers at German universities are constantly working on developing better and more efficient methods to extract raw materials from used electrical equipment, especially from mobile phone batteries. The industry relies on such technologies for recycling metals such as nickel, cadmium and zinc.

The RWTH Aachen University is foremost in developing recycling methods. Its institute of Process Metallurgy and Metal Recycling (IME) developed melting technologies that allow metals to be separated and recovered from nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries in industrial quantities. The university’s latest developments focus on recycling lithium-ion batteries for mobile phones, notebooks or MP3-players, from which manganese and cobalt can be extracted.

Mobile phone recycling is easy

All mobile network operators have their own mobile phone recycling systems. Consumers can usually either return old mobile phones to the network operator free of charge or take them back to their local stores. Operators often reward each returned mobile phone by making a donation to environmental organisations, child aid projects or other social institutions.