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!!

Nokia has been focusing its research on green products, from handset development to shipping, use and End-Of-Life practices.

With almost 10 billion customers, Nokia certainly can help make a difference in educating their users, producing energy efficient products in many ways and more.

Educating customers and helping them do the right thing

Power Consumption

“Nokia has set the target to reduce the average no-load consumption of its chargers by 50%, and the no-load consumption of its best-in-class chargers to close to zero, by 2010″. No-load consumption is evidently when your charger is plugged in the power outlet with no phone on the other end. Nokia is also pushing its customers to think about un-plugging their chargers when not in use.

In fact, in 2007, Nokia has launched the first devices with “reminder alerts for consumers to unplug chargers once the battery is recharged”. Nokia has estimated this could save enough electricity to power 85,000 homes a year.

Recycling devices and packaging

Nokia is pushing its customers to recycle their old phones. If you are a Nokia user, click here to find the closest drop off location. Most likely if your phone is pretty new, you should have found a prepaid envelop inside the packaging of your phone. If so, use it to ship your device.

Look below to see how a recycled phone will be broken apart and all its pieces used towards:

Producing Energy Efficient Products

I love this graph below. Basically it shows each step, from the production of a mobile phone to its consumption bt the consumers and how much waste, non-eco substances, water, energy is used and could potentially be saved. We looked above at the Use and at the EOL (End-Of-Life) practices. We are now going to look at all what’s happening before the product gets into the customers’ hands.

The Making of

The first Nokia building to receive the LEED green certification was in White Plains, NY. For every new building, Nokia is seeking this level of sustainability. This can hopefully help in setting new standards for the industry.

“Management Systems (EMS) at Nokia production sites are ISO 14001 compliant”. Nokia works on the following factors: Energy consumption, Water Consumption, Air emissions, Non-Eco Substances, Waste management and Packaging. Nokia also requires its suppliers to respect a set of guidelines.
Nokia should reduce its overall energy consumption of 6% by 2012 and plans to increase its use of green electricity from 25% to 50% by 2010.

Clean and Recyclable Materials

Nokia has banned a list of substances that are not environmentally friendly and stopped using this list in the technology they produce. More info here.

Smaller products for smaller packaging, fewer shipping trucks

Nokia has considerably be reducing the amount of material used for their packagings. Smaller phones, smaller packagings, more packages on each truck and therefore less truck on the road.

More green stuff Nokia is working on

The Nokia Eco Sensor Concept. A personal assistant to “monitor your health, environment, and local weather”, powered in part by solar energy.

I want to see more companies that try not only to produce green goods, but also work on increasing the public awereness and its education about green matters.