GreenTech: Cellphone recycling is big business for Fonebak
With over a billion mobile phones on the planet, there's a lot of money to be made in collecting old phones for recycling and refurbishing. Fonebak is a European company that works with wireless carriers across the continent to recycle old phones.Some old phones can be touched up with a new screen or battery and sold as refurbished phones. Fonebank also helps rescue other handsets that would normally be on their way to a landfill, where they could cause serious groundwater pollution.
But it turns out those same metals that can contaminate the water can also be useful in constructing new phones and other products. In fact, Fonebank made £60.4 or about $124 million last year. The company has collected over 3.5 million phones since 2002. But that's just a small dent in the market. There are over a billion mobile phone customers around the world today. And if they don't find an easy alternative, they'll probably throw those phones out when they're no longer useful.
[via Digital Planet]
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