Recycling – good for you and good for the environment!
Over the past probably twelve years I’ve had so many mobile phones I can’t remember them all. Either they break, or the battery starts to let you down, they don’t do something you want them to do, or they just go out of fashion. Old handsets are often either thrown away or just lie about the house in a drawer, waiting to go to the mobile phone graveyard in the sky.
That is, until the recent trend towards recycling them. Mobile phone companies have realised how many parts of the phone can be reused in one form or another and it is now common for phone companies to offer some kind of part exchange deal on a new phone, or sometimes to offer cash for your old handset that you are no longer using. Any online search will bring up numerous companies who are interested in purchasing your old handsets and who will pay good money for them. Or you could do what we’ve been doing in our office and collect them for charity. Last year we collected around 250 old handsets, and traded them in for over 2000 dollars which we donated to our local hospice. This year we’ve persuaded the company to participate rather than just the staff, and as senior managers upgrade their phones once a year we should be able to break last year’s record easily. We’ve had draws to decide which charities to support, and extra fundraising activities to top the funds up, but the mobile phone cash exchange project was by far our biggest money spinner, and so easy to implement.
So not only have we helped our charity, we’ve got rid of something that would otherwise have lain about in the house creating a mess, and also helped the environment by encouraging mobile companies to reuse rather than make new. And it made us all feel good about ourselves. Good Luck if you decide to have a go.
