The third drawer of Jennifer Simpson’s desk is the graveyard for some of her old companions.
“I hang on to them partly out of sentimental reasons,” Simpson said. “They were so important that I feel like I should keep them for now, just in case.”
Simpson, Topeka sophomore, isn’t preserving valuable documents or storing souvenirs for safe-keeping, but is instead holding on to something that has been close by her side since her 16th birthday: her cell phones.
More than 500 million cell phones lay unused in the United States according to an April 2007 report by the Environmental Protection Agency. The report estimated that 150 million more phones will be discarded this year. The number promises to grow each future year, and the small devices can have big effects on the environment if, when evicted from the drawer, they are thrown away rather than recycled.
“A cell phone is so small that you don’t even think twice about throwing it away,” said Gerald Hartman, lead technician at Kansas E-Recycle, a private electronics recycling service. “A computer is so bulky, most people know they should recycle it.”
The number of cell phone users in the United States more than tripled from 1996 to 2006 according to a survey by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. The rapid availability of cell phone upgrades has caused the increase in cell phone waste, as consumers purchase more of newer models of phones and more of their older phones enter the waste system.
Discarded cell phones are a sliver of the growing problem of electronic waste, or e-waste: unwanted electronics that pose health and environmental risks if not recycled. Cell phones, along with computers, televisions and household appliances, contain lead and mercury, two elements that cause damage to the brain and the peripheral nervous system if they are put into landfills and are able to enter the water supply.
Local recycling services have not been able to keep up with the steady increase of e-waste that has come from living in a world of ever-advancing technology.
“It’s not a very simple thing to do,” said Kathy Richardson, supervisor of Lawrence Waste Reduction and Recycling, which operates the city’s public recycling services. “Not only does it require a big facility, it requires paid staff. You don’t make money off of it.”
Though the state does not consider electronics hazardous waste -- only seven states do -- the Kansas Department of Health and Environment is taking a step to curb e-waste by introducing a grant to fund the construction of e-waste collection facilities in five Kansas counties. The grants will also fund two years of operating expenses for the warehouses, and KDHE will pay each county three cents per pound of electronic waste that it moves from the warehouse to a recycler.
“At the national level, the solutions to try to deal with this have not appeared,” said Kent Foerster, chief of waste reduction, grants and public outreach at KDHE. “We wanted to see what we could do to spark more collection, and then take the data from this experience and push for legislation.”
Foerster said the department planned to have the new facilities spread out across the state in both urban and rural communities. The grants will be awarded in September and the collection facilities should be operating by January 2008.
Though Douglas County has the highest recycling rate in the state of Kansas according to Lawrence Waste Reduction and Recycling -- with 34 percent of its total waste being recycled -- the county may not be among those applying for the new grant.
“For the city of Lawrence to take on a project like this, it would be very important for us to track where our waste ends up,” Richardson said. She was concerned that the state-funded collection facilities would pass the e-waste to recyclers who would extract the valuable materials like gold and copper and put the rest in a landfill, still allowing the toxic elements into the environment. Another of Richardson’s concerns was that the e-waste would be exported to parts of the world where recyclers could find cheaper labor but where the material would still be left to pollute the environment.
“To pay a person here to process equipment costs a lot of money,” Richardson said. “Instead it’s going to really poor countries, to towns where there’s not even a landfill. But if we’re polluting China, we’re polluting ourselves.”
Foerster said the state could not guarantee that e-waste gathered in the collection facilities wouldn’t end up overseas because the federal government had not placed restrictions on this method of disposal. He said the state did plan to regulate the local recyclers that the new facilities use to ensure that the recyclers do not remove the valuable components of an electronic and send the rest to a landfill.
“We can require that they take it to a vendor that we approve. If we’re paying for it, that’s the way it will be done,” Foerster said.
Though she said Douglas County has not ruled out applying for the grant, Richardson emphasized existing alternatives for e-waste disposal.
“I think Lawrence has a lot of options,” Richardson said. “People get stuck thinking there should be mandatory city-sponsored recycling.”
Kansas E-Recycle, which recycles the University’s old electronics, picks up most old electronics taken to UNI Computers, 1403 W. 23rd Street. Gerald Hartman, the only collector for Kansas E-Recycle, said about five percent of electronics that he picks up are up-to-date and in good condition, and he passes them along to charitable organizations. About 20 percent are obsolete models that he sends to other countries where those models are still in use, and about 75 percent of what Hartman collects is disassembled for individual parts to be reused or disposed of through environmentally-safe processes.
“The main goal is to keep it out of a landfill,” Hartman said. “Most recyclers are honest, but I know of a few ones around here that aren’t.”
Located in Eskridge, Kansas E-Recycle mostly collects e-waste for northeast Kansas, though Hartman said he had made trips to Wichita, Goodland and even Lincoln, Neb. to pick up unwanted electronics from collection sites that want to make sure their waste is properly disposed of.
Hartman started Kansas E-Recycle in October 1999 after working as a computer technician and noticing the growing amount of e-waste but no emerging solution for the problem. Though he said he was pleased with the state’s decision to fund e-waste collection facilities and hoped to contract with some of them, Hartman said more action was needed on the federal level if e-waste was to be sufficiently dealt with.
“If they don’t step in and help the recyclers with our expenses, there’s going to be millions of televisions in landfills in the next few years,” Hartman said, referring to U.S. television broadcasts becoming exclusively digital in February 2009, which will make every analog television set obsolete -- an estimated 12 percent of televisions in use in the United States.
Hartman said the ideal procedure for controlling e-waste would be customers paying a recycling fee as part of purchasing any new electronic.
On campus, KU Recycling collects large electronics placed with other outgoing recyclable materials at each building’s designated pick-up point. For small electronics like cell phones, students living in residence halls or scholarship halls can pick up mail-in packets from each building’s academic resource center to send in their electronics to be recycled by the manufacturer. Jeff Severin, manager of the University’s Environmental Stewardship Program, said KU Recycling began stocking student housing with the packets in fall 2005 as cell phones were becoming a staple among college students.
Another option for students wanting to get old cell phones off their hands in an environmentally-friendly way is through the online business RIPMobile, which pays for old cell phones in the form gift certificates to businesses like Circuit City and Starbucks.
“We make recycling feel like consuming, which everyone likes to do,” said RIPMobile President and CEO Seth Heine, who started the business in 2005.
Anyone recycling a cell phone through RIPMobile visits the business’s Web site, ripmobile.com, where they calculate the phone’s value and choose the business through which they want to be reimbursed in gift certificates. Customers also have the option of donating the return on their old cell phones to charities. RIPMobile cleans phones of all content and sends them to buyers around the world, which is what allows them to pass part of the phone’s worth on to its original owner. Even if a phone has no value, RIPMobile still recycles it to keep its harmful components from ending up in a landfill.
Heine said he started RIPMobile to draw attention to a type of waste that even those who consistently recycle tend to overlook.
“I just realized that everyone had a phone sitting in a drawer that could easily be put to use somewhere else,” Heine said.
College students make up a large part of Heine’s market, as he said most students upgrade their cell phones annually.
After learning about the incentives offered through RIPMobile, Simpson said she was more likely to recycle her three old cell phones should she ever decide she wants her drawer space back.
“Even though recycling should already feel rewarding, it never hurts to use money to motivate people,” Simpson said.