MyGlobalCity

Happy Earth Day To You - Or What To Do With Your Old Cell Phone April 27, 2006

With Earth Day (Apr 22) just gone by, I was lamenting that I once again didn’t do anything significant or “green”. (I did, however, go to the first year of Earth Day celebrations when I lived in Toronto many years ago.) This thought was particularly triggered when I read how some of the large European smartcard vendors are rushing out half-baked cell phone products with SIM cards that have been rewired , just to meet deadlines. Their publicly state intent is to fix the problem with later releases of the cell phone model.

So where, then, does that leave people who buy these currently new phones? Does that mean they’ll need to replace their handsets in a couple of years? Ooops, stupid me. That’s kinda been the design of cell phones anyway. Raise your hands if you’ve had a cell phone last more than 2-3 years. Most of change our mobile phone handsets quite regularly out of necessity or fashion.

I myself have a drawer full of about 6 or 7 old handsets, simply because I really don’t know what to do with them. I’ve even visited those little electronics shops that refurbish and resell older handsets, but they’ve turned me down. Seems the cellular provider I used to use uses a technology for which they can’t tweak the id chip. So, sorry, but they can’t use my phones.

I’ve thought about ripping them apart with a pair of pliers, just to see what’s inside. (I was one of those nerd kids who had not one but 3 electronics experiment kits.) I’ve even thought about whether I can make some sort of scultpure out them, then show them in a gallery and pretend I’m some enfant terrible nouveau cyberpunk artist. But they artistic synapses haven’t been firing lately.

I did manage to give away one handset once, a few years ago, but with sexy slim phones being de rigeur, no one wants a beastly old phone that’s more than a few microns thick. So what, I wonder, is everyone else doing with their old phones? I don’t know the numbers, but I’m guessing that there are over 300 million cell phone users in the world. Gawd, I’m probably way off; it might be double that.

But if each cellular subscriber had several old phones sitting around, we have a virtual cell phone graveyard of 1.5-2.0 million handsets. Economist Paul Zane Pilzer may go against common belief (in his book Unlimited Wealth) and claim that our “finite resources on Earth” mentality is nonsense, but there’s still a lot of reclaimable resources in 2 million handsets. Isn’t there?

If there isn’t, why not? Does the Kyoto Accord address the design of disposal products? (I really don’t know, as I haven’t laid my mitts on a copy of the accord yet.) Even if it doesn’t, why don’t cell phone manufacturers design their handsets to either biodegrade or to be reused?

I only have 4 years of high school electronics classes, but that’s enough to know that even the efficient circuit boards of today use up precious resources that are not or cannot be salvaged once the boards are kaput. Still, I can’t help feeling that there is some use to which we can put old cell phones. Anyone have any ideas?

Technorati Tags: myglobalcity, my global city, cell phones, kyoto accord, paul zane pilzer, earth day, recycling