Author: Craig Timmins

North America’s biggest cell phone recycling scheme, Call2Recycle, has added a new member to its Board of Directors. The company announced yesterday the appointment of John Bradford, currently serving as the chief innovations officer for Interface Americas, Division of Interface Inc, to the Board of Directors of RBRC, the company which manages Call2Recycle.

Four youths have been arrested in Nagpur, India, for breaking into a store and then attempting to sell cell phones they had stolen in order to pay back gambling debts. The four teenagers, all between the ages of sixteen and seventeen – which makes them legal minors in India – were arrested by police when sub-inspector Ashok Deotale saw them loitering around a pan kiosk at Sahakar Nagar. When the teens acted suspiciously when confronted with routine questions, police brought them back to the station for further questioning and the group was soon spilling their guts about their crime.

A six year old school student decided to help save the gorillas by launching a cell phone recycling scheme in her elementary school after a visit to Cincinnati Zoo. Alaina Spencer wrote a letter to her principal, Jean Hartman of Waynesville Elementary School, asking her to get the school to set up a cell phone recycling process to help protect gorillas. “Cell phones have a mineral that miners have to dig for. The mine is in the gorilla’s habit and the miners have to cut down gorilla’s homes,” the six year old wrote in her letter. Alaina, the daughter of Holli and Blaine Spencer, was writing about mountain gorillas in Eastern Congo, where gorillas habitats are indeed being cut down to facilitate mining for the mineral coltan, which is used in the batteries of cellular phones. “If they have to move, they might get cold and die,” the six year old says. “They might not get the plants they need.”

The rate of recycling of old cell phones and rechargeable batteries has hit a new high, according to Call2Recycle. The company, which remains the only free used cellular phone and battery collection program in the whole of North America, says that its overall collections increased by over ten percent in 2010, establishing a new record for growth for the program. Via its network of more than thirty thousand business, municipal and retail partners, Call2Recycle picked up more than six and a half million pounds of used cell phones and rechargeable batteries last year. The biggest increase came in the Canadian province of British Columbia, which increased its recycling rate by a simply staggering four hundred and twenty percent. Statistics for the recycling of batteries in Canada in general show that across the country the rate increased by around eighty one percent, with a fifty nine percent in the province of Ontario which, along with British Columbia, was the target of an expansion of the Call2Recycle program as of July 1 last year to include all kinds of household batteries.

How much is my cell phone worth? It might be worth a lot.

At Sell Cell, it is our job to help you get the most money for your old cell phone. That is what we do. But while getting money for your cell is great; the truth is, that old cell phone is worth more than the cash it brings.

Mercer Elementary School is looking a little green as a result of its new cell phone recycling scheme, being headed by a bunch of third graders. Just before the Christmas holidays, the students of teacher Mary Lou Van Eman and Dana Olsen, the school’s reading recovery teacher, began to draw up their plans for a new cell phone recycling program. The third grade class has managed to get the whole of Mercer Elementary School involved with the project and as of Friday, over two hundred used cell phones have already been handed in. Third graders Dylan Nugent and Claire Steinbrunner say that newer used cell phones will be refurbished, given new chips and sent to island countries such as Haiti, while those old cell phones that are somewhat beyond refurbishing will be smelted and then recycled in other ways. The program, the main emphasis of which is on “Going Green” will carry on until the end of this week.

Streamlight Inc has joined the call. The company, which manufactures high performance flashlights and is regarded as one of the biggest names in that industry, has joined in with the recycling program known as Call2Recycle. Call2Recycle was set up to help with the recycling of rechargeable batteries and old cell phones in North America way back in 1994, and in the almost seventeen years since its inception has sent more than fifty million pounds of rechargeable batteries and old cellular phones that would otherwise have been headed to landfills to one of their thirty thousand recycling drop off locations across the country.

The student council at the Magnolia West High School in Houston has decided to take action on the environment, setting up its own cell phone recycling scheme for school students. Magnolia West High School student council member Jaiden Whitely said the council decided to pursue the project as one of their philanthropy assignments for the current school semester, and soon saw the benefits of persuading people to get into the cell phone recycling process rather than just throwing them out to end up as landfill.