Spring Cleaning Project: Series 1

This is my first in a series of spring cleaning posts. I know it’s only February 29th, but spring is fast approaching and I want my house to be spick and span. (And do I really need a season to make me clean house?) I will be posting often about tips to cleaning out and finding great places to donate or recycle your “junk”.

I know that in my house we have a few old cell phones lying around. We keep them thinking they are full of sacred data, I mean hey some of them cost us a pretty penny so it’s hard to part with them. Plus knowing what chemicals go into these babies it’s hard to feel comfortable throwing them away. Cell phones contain toxic materials such as arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, antimony and beryllium. These end up in land fills leaching into the soil and finally into our water supply. The numbers are staggering, there are over 500+ million cell phones in landfills or on shelves unused to date, and over 130+ million more adding to that list this year alone. And YES the post photo is a cell phone pile! There are many organizations that will help with this issue, taking your old phone and recycling it properly or donating them to a good cause. This is one that I’ve found.

Collective Good is an organization focused on working with charities to maximize the recycled cell phone while minimizing its environmental impact . Collective Good provides refurbished phones to the “developing world” (a term I don’t really appreciate but that’s a whole other post) at low cost. Any part of the phone that is unusable for any reason is recycled properly, so no need to worry about that. On their website you can print out a mailing label and it’s FREE to ship! Of course you can get the address on their FAQ’s and send it yourself, thus donating a few more dollars to this great organization. I urge you all to think, do I still have that old phone? Ask friends, get a bunch together and send a whole load of them. And don’t worry, all of your personal data is removed so you can rest assure that there’s no security risk there.

Here’s the website:
www.collectivegood.com or you can go directly to the page at www.recyclemy cellphone.org
(Image: www.textually.org)