HookedOnRecycling.com Investigates How Mobile Phone Recycling Helps Protect Endangered Species

    MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, March 31, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Aside from the cash and landfill benefits, mobile phone recycling schemes may well have another important role to play, HookedOnRecyling.com researches further.

The recycling of mobile phones has seen a boom in popularity in recent years with a whole host of recycling website and companies offering to pay cash for any type of phone, working or not. In the UK alone, 15 million handsets were recycled last year, enough to stretch from one end of the country to the other.

There are obvious benefits to recycling your old mobile phone through companies such as the well-known, https://www.love2recycle.com not least the cash and also the environmental impact, allowing your phone to be reused instead of sent to landfill. The latter is a particularly important point for conservationists who campaign furiously about toxic chemicals in mobiles phones leaking out and affecting local water supplies, plant life and wildlife.

But some conservationists are saying that mobile phone recycling can have another hugely positive effect on a specific species of animal, the Gorilla's of central Africa. This is because; in addition to the cadmium, arsenic, copper, zinc and lead in mobile phones, there is another ingredient that's causing damage in a different way and its name is coltan.

Coltan is used in the manufacture of mobile phones and the largest excavations of the mineral are currently in the forests of Congo, central Africa, habitat of the endangered lowland gorillas. The majority of the coltan needed for the ever-expanding mobile phone industry has come from Congo's out-of-control coltan mining businesses.

The mining of coltan for mobile phones has dramatically reduced animal habitats and contributed to a 70% population decline of the eastern lowland gorilla. Speaking about the situation, Karen Killmar, the associate curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo said: "Recycling old phones is a way for people to do something very simple that could reduce the need for additional coltan ... and help protect the gorillas."

Sandra Waldorf, from HookedOnRecycling.com, said: "By recycling mobile phones, people can help to cut the need for new handsets and in turn reduce the mining of minerals for manufacture." Whether the plight of the lowland gorillas will encourage people more than a wad of cash in the current climate remains to be seen. But with an estimated 90 million unused phones in UK households, it's definitely another reason to have a root in those draws and recycle your old tech.

Website: http://www.hookedonrecycling.com

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