Increasing government regulation coupled with force to reduce the environmental defects from unused mobile phones is not really a bad thing. Hazardous materials are banned throughout our society. Hazardous waste management is often considered as a complicated process; still the producers and other well developed organization take the responsibility for the recycling. Mobile phone sectors are one of the fastest growing industries in the world. According to a survey the life of a mobile phone is only 18 months with the arrival of a new model in the market. This leads to the junk storage of old phones in their drawer. To minimize the volume of bulk amount of mobile phones ending up in landfills, recycling of them is mandatory.
Typical disposal of the unused mobile phones or their accessories result in one of the following alternatives:
- Reuse
- Product upgrade
- Material recovery
- Waste disposal.
Reusing deals with the reselling or reusing the products. Product upgrade is to repair, re-manufacture, refurbish and repackage. Material recovery is recycling and reduction in sales volume. Waste disposal includes incineration or land filling the waste products.
Mobile phones have a number of components which have a clear ability to re-manufacture them. Integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, gold-coated edge contacts on the circuit boards, microphones, the protective housing around them and keyboards can be recovered and reused. Recycling companies promises that their recycling will be environment friendly with nothing going into the landfills.
Consumers who are willing to get a new model can hand over their old phones to the retailers for recycling instead of keeping them in their drawer. There are a lot of persistent bio-accumulative toxins in the circuit board of the mobile phones. Once when they are thrown in the lands without giving for recycling, they pollute the soil and the underground water. The most important hazardous metal in the circuit board of the mobile phones are the lead. When they are thrown in the land they pollute the drinking water, this causes kidney problem, affect the immune and nervous system too.
Lead is threatening more when compared to other metals in the circuit board. The interesting fact is that, gold in the circuit board can be recovered and used. Recovering them by one