South Korea - recycling cellphones

As Old Phones Pile Up, So Do Environmental Worries

The average Korean consumer gets a new mobile phone every 28 months, a survey by the Association of Electronics Environment has found, meaning two thirds of the country's mobile phone users or 15 million people every year buy new phones. This should also mean a stockpile of 10 million used phones, given the number of new subscribers. So where are all these old phones?

During an audit of state affairs last year, Grand National Party lawmaker Suh Sang-kee, a member of the National Assembly's Science, Technology, Information and Telecommunication Committee, said that some 125 million mobile phones had been produced in Korea since 1999, but only 40 million had been collected. The telecom industry and environmental groups say that 40-50 million of the remaining 85 million phones are probably lying idle in junk drawers or decaying in rubbish heaps. And many of those in the junk drawers will eventually end up with their brothers in the rubbish when cleaning time comes around.

The AEE estimates that about 8 million old phones are buried or incinerated every year. These dumped phones can contaminate the environment because they are essentially lumps of heavy metals. According to the audit by lawmaker Suh, each handset contains about 0.26 g of lead, 2.5 g of cadmium, 274 g of cobalt, and 20 g of arsenic. Dumping 40-50 million handsets is tantamount to dumping over 11 tons of lead.

Park June-woo, a professor of economics at Sangmyung University, said that the best thing to do economically is to keep using them. "A handset has no more than W400 (US$1=W1,043) worth of metals or plastic," he said. "It's economically more valuable to reuse them if they still work properly." About 1 million phones were resold every year until a subsidy system for subscribers was reinstated recently, which pushed the figure down to some 100,000. Since the subsidies allow consumers to buy phones for just W50,000 to W100,000, fewer people are interested in second-hand phones.

In order to resolve the environmental and social costs of some 40 million idle phones, Prof. Park said the agencies that dominate the mobile phone retail market should provide incentives to consumers to collect used ones. But while reusing old phones can prevent overproduction and over-consumption, it can also damage the credibility of established brands when they are exported to China or resold in Korea. "Selling recycled phones under a third brand can be one solution," Park pointed out.