Established by Planet Ark in conjunction with major mobile phone retail outlets, the scheme aims to recycle 500,000 handsets in the next 12 months.
Jon Dee, founder of Planet Ark, said it had already signed up 2000 retail outlets to collect and pass-on the phones, with Telstra, Optus and Vodafone shop-fronts leading the charge. Dee claims there are currently more than 10 million -defunct" mobile phones sitting idle throughout Australia, and Planet Ark hopes to recycle a large number of these as they're handed in for upgrade at mobile phone retail stores.
-People have hoarded mobile phones in their homes and offices for years," Dee said. -The reason is because they've spent a lot of money on their mobiles and they don't want to throw them away, even though they've totally lost their value".
Although a 40 cent levy will be imposed on every new mobile handset sold in Austraila in order to cover the cost of collection and recycling of the phones, Dee said this fee will barely be noticed by local consumers, as the charge has been in place for the past year to cover a trial run of the scheme.
-Everybody's given the phone for free these days - it's part of the whole package," he added.
Dee said that technological advances are finally allowing the environmental problems of computers to be addressed, and the next stage of Planet Ark's plan to help the Australian IT&T industry think green is a PC recycling scheme.
-One of the things we're looking at in the next two years is to set up a Web site so major companies who want to get rid of [PC] equipment can register, then we can give those PCs to schools and community groups."
-It's about time that computer companies followed the mobile industry's lead and set a levy to cover the cost of collection and recycling of every computer," he said.
The recycling of 50,000 mobile phones would produce around one and a half kilos of gold, as well as nickel, copper and plastic.
We are already recycling pc's and electronic components and have been doing so for nearly 20 years.
Check us out www.hmrgroup.com
Regards
Geoff Brooklyn
Sales/IT Manager
HMR Sydney Pty Ltd