In 2006, the CTIA-The Wireless Association® created a national recycling campaign the Wireless…The New Recyclable^TM. In 2008, CTIA is now requesting the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) and other agencies to partner and create a new movement: Recycle Your Cell Phone. It’s An Easy Call. Logically, the goal of this campaign is to “increase public awareness of cell phone recycling and donation opportunities, with the ultimate goal of increasing the nation’s cell phone recycling rate”.

What can we do with wireless recycling? Most manufacturers and carriers propose a recycling program thanks to the CTIA initiative (such as Nokia, as seen in my previous article).

The following websites propose recycling and charity donations programs: Collective Good, Charitable Recycling, or GRC Wireless Recycling. But my favorite one is ReCellular. It was founded in 1991 and has, since then, partnered with the CTIA and the largest industry players to create a multi-program: ReCellular allows you to buy, sell and donate used cell phones.

Their purchasing and reselling programs are available for businesses only. Their donation program allows you to either create a donation program within your company or simply donate your phone / company phones to one of their partners. Here is the process.

First, as they say, you need to prepare your phone for recycling. I know this sounds maybe obvious for some of you, but just in case:

Then just go here and look at the different charities ReCellular is partnering with. You can choose to donate your phone to the think-food organization, the Victory Junction Gang or many others. Once your choice is made (and again, there are other websites proposed above that will offer more organizations to donate to, so don’t feel restrained), just go to this page, enter your zip code, the program chosen and find the closest drop off location. If you don’t select any program, the search will just give you the 5 closest drop off programs.

Leaving the donation world, another national organization is RBRC and its Call2Recycle^TM program. They will take any battery or cellphone and make recycling easy if you’d rather have your phone completely de-constructed and reborn in… a pretty orange traffic cone.

Cara also talks about Call2Recycle^TM here in a more detailed manner ;)

I personally never had to recycle my phone. During my first year in New York, I lost my phone about 5 or 6 times. I had 1 Nokia 3220, 1 T-609 looking Samsung, followed by 4 T-809. My dad got me my first 809 so I just could not tell him I had lost it. I had to keep buying the same model… I still have it but now I am ready for a change. Can’t wait to recycle it!!