Cell phone recycling from start to finish

With half a billion cell phones retired last year, it's comforting to know that a good portion of them actually got recycled instead of ending up in landfills. But, as I've written about many times in this blog, "recycling" has lots of different meanings. How does one really "recycle" a cell phone?

Technology Review has a fascinating photo essay of the cell phone recycling process from start to finish. It's short on words (and some of them are strangely missing from the piece), but it's a tale best told in pictures anyway.

It's comforting to know that, with cell phones, re-use is the first step: Phones are tested in bulk at companies like ReCellular, and the ones in working order can be resold or donated to charities: A whopping 60 percent of phones submitted for recycling are in good enough condition to be reused. (And some handsets are refurbished up to three times before finally hitting the scrap heap.)

If they don't work, the batteries are removed and recycled on their own, then the phones move on to the recycler, which grinds them into tiny bits. The plastic is incinerated and the metal components are melted down. A silicon slag rises to the top: It's sold for use in shingles and road construction. The metal portion is cooled into those nifty, long bars, which are an amalgam of silver, gold, and palladium. They're sold to metal recovery firms, which then refine them down further into base metals, ultimately recovering about a dollar's worth of precious metal per phone from the ingots.

Very cool stuff, and amazing to see how lengthy and labor-intensive the process is. Check out all the photos at this link.