Of the 889 million people in China who use mobile phones, only 1% are recycled. The average user upgrades their phone every 15 months so the number of phones thrown away is massive.
Some of the mobile phones that are recycled are sent to programmes such as Nokia’s Green Box project. For the majority of the mobile phones that are just thrown away, there is an increasing demand from entrepreneurs looking to make money from the components found in old phones.
In some cities in China, hundreds of small companies are buying and collecting old mobile phones to trade them on, treating them as a commodity. The process that is involved from collection to resell is lengthy and carried out by many different individuals and companies.
Firstly, all of the components such as the circuit boards and plastic shells are separated. The circuit boards are put under a heat gun to loosen the solder on the Surface Mounted Components. The components are then picked off using tweezers and separated. The solder is removed and the components are cleaned and sorted further. Before being sold on to be used in new phones, components are checked for obvious damage and tested using rewired versions of the devices that the chips originally came from. The most valuable chips are reprogrammed and used to build new phones.
So even though phones are not being recycled in the ‘traditional’ way that we’ve come to know, the key parts are being reused which prevents them being sent to landfill and damaging the environment.