Recycle Your Phone

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The New York Times is covering the EPA's new campaign to encourage people to dispose of their cell phones responsibly.

By the agency’s reckoning, as many as 150 million cellphones are taken out of service each year. The phones contain metals, plastics, glass and chemicals, all of which require energy to mine and make, and many of which could be hazardous if they end up in landfills and leach into the ground. Moreover, many old cellphones still work and can be donated to charities or distributed to poor people.

“There are significant environmental and energy benefits to getting these phones back into the product stream,” the director of the agency’s office of solid waste, Matt Hale, said.

The $175,000 campaign — “Recycle Your Cellphone. It’s an Easy Call” — will rely heavily on public service announcements, particularly in lifestyle and technology magazines read by the 18- to 34-year-olds who trade up to new cellphones most often. The ads will stress environmental and social reasons for recycling. The agency also plans to release a podcast in which recycling specialists elaborate on their methodologies.

The E.P.A. said it would schedule several cellphone collections in 2008 and would post a searchable list of cellphone drop-off centers on Web sites, including epa.gov. It will also distribute posters with the “It’s an easy call” tagline to partners, to post over drop-off bins.

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