Australia Post promotes mobile phone recycling service

Australia Post is urging Australians to dig up their old mobile phones and take advantage of MobileMuster, a free mobile phone recycling service offered through its outlets. “Across Australia there are approximately 16m old mobile phones sitting in people’s cupboards and drawers,” said Australia Post spokesperson Ruth Snelleman.

“If you collected all of these old phones and laid them out end-to-end, they would stretch from Brisbane to Adelaide,” Snelleman said.

Only 9% of mobile phone users in Australia recycled their previous mobile phone, with the majority of people keeping them at home.

The good news is that over 90% of the materials in mobile phones can be recovered and used as raw materials for new products. What’s more, it’s not just the handset that can be recycled. The plastics and metals in mobile phone batteries, chargers and accessories can also be recycled.

“Recycling mobile phones is easy,” Snelleman said. “All you need to do is collect a satchel from your local Australia Post outlet, place the phone with the battery connected in one section of the satchel and accessories in the other section, and post it in any street posting box.”

Old batteries can be recycled to make new batteries, circuit boards include small amounts of gold and silver that can be used to make jewellery, and handset casings include plastics that can be used to make fence posts.

“The gold recovered from the estimated 16m mobile phones in people’s homes could be used to create nearly 24 000 wedding bands,” Snelleman said.

As one of the largest resellers of pre-paid phones and accessories, Australia Post values its role in recycling these products. Since it joined the MobileMuster program in May 2008, Australia Post has helped to recycle over 68,000 handsets, 69,000 batteries and more than 6,000 kilograms of accessories.