In the UK less than 12% mobile phones are refurbished or sold to be reused again whereas the potential to reuse mobile phone before they had towards recycling company to get crushed and metals extracted from them is more than 70%. There is a different reason for mobile phones not to be recycled. According to a mobile phone recycling company in the UK, there are two main reasons why mobile phones are not recycled to be reused again in the UK.
- Getting a mobile phone repaired is expensive in the UK due to expensive labour and in some cases the high cost associated with parts especially the mobile phone screens. Due to this reason, people underestimate the value held by broken mobile phones. Hence most of the times these broken mobile phones end us in people’s drawers rather than heading towards mobile phone recycling companies for refurbishment.
- There is always news about some data leakage and this has scared people a lot and despite resetting mobile phone back to the factory settings, its often assumed that the data can be retrieved and the personal photos and other personal details can go into wrong hands. It’s almost a myth as most of the mobile phone vendors have incorporated systems which assure the data destruction once the mobile phone is set back to the factory settings.
- Rapid Phone Buyer, a mobile phone recycling company based in the UK has taken 25,000 recycled mobile phones data to assert where most of the mobile phones have come to the company and has revealed the following results.
Top 10 Mobile Phone Recycling cities (data from Rapid Phone Buyer purchases)
| 1. London | 2140 | 8.56% |
| 2. York | 1344 | 5.37% |
| 3.Manchester | 749 | 3.00% |
| 4. Nottingham | 495 | 1.98% |
| 5. Bristol | 435 | 1.74% |
| 6. Glasgow | 409 | 1.64% |
| 7. Derby | 384 | 1.54% |
| 8. Leicester | 382 | 1.53% |
| 9. Birmingham | 314 | 1.26% |
| 10. Leeds | 280 | 1.12% |
Almost 28% of the devices received were from 10 major cities. Although there is only one big city in Scotland on the list, the total number of mobile phones recycled from Scotland is more than 35% which is much more than England, Wales and Ireland. According to the company, most of the mobile phones which come from the small town scattered in Highlands and one of the reason can be said to be the shattered nature of small establishments where people have limited options to sell their mobile phones so most of them head towards the internet to sell their old mobile phones.
But the mobile phone recycling company emphasised on the need to promote mobile phones recycling as Refurbishing old models also has wider environmental benefits as researchers at McMaster University in Canada claimed last year that manufacturing a new smartphone used 85-95 per cent of the device’s CO2 output over a two-year lifecycle because of the requirements in mining the raw materials. And if there are more refurbished mobile phones in the market, it will help decrease the demand of newer models helping the environment not only in the shorter run but also in the longer run. Refurbished mobile phones not only help the environment but also can play a vital role in saving a huge amount of foreign exchange.
