MobileMuster recycles old phones

Australians discard 2000 tonnes of mobile phones every year.

The average weight of a mobile phone is about 250g – that means four of them weigh a kilogram. There is a saturated market in Australia – virtually every phone is a replacement, which means for virtually every new phone bought, an old one is discarded.

People tend not to throw them away, because they were so valuable in the first place. They end up in cupboards and desk drawers.

There are about 20 million mobile phones in use in Australia, and the average person gets a new one every two to three years. Let’s say two years and eight months – that means about eight million phones a year are discarded. Multiply it out – 8 million x 250g = 2000 tonnes.

A Melbourne tram weighs about 25 tonnes, a Sydney train carriage twice as much. The weight of all the mobile phones discarded in Australia each year is the same as that of 80 Melbourne trams or 40 Sydney train carriages. And the weight is growing, with new technologies meaning people keep changing their phones frequently, even if the old ones work perfectly well. And that’s not even counting chargers, packaging and accessories.

The mobile industry has responded with an initiative called Mobile Muster, an industry-funded, not-for-profit recycling program. The organisation has now committed to recycling an extra 130 tonnes on top of current collection volumes over the next five years.