How to recycle your mobile

Australia has a good recycling system for mobile phones. But not many people know about it. Only about 10% of phones are getting recycled.

Why is it important?

As a nation we have 25 million old phones lying around the house.

How much is that?

Craig Reucassel from War on Waste covered this car (and filled the hatch) with mobile phones. He fit in 1,500 phones. To carry all of Australia's old and broken phones, he would need 17,000 cars like this.

That's a lot of waste if they get thrown in the bin. Even the little bit of gold in each broken phone would add up to tens of millions of dollars being thrown away.

So how do we recycle them?

The program is Mobile Muster. You can drop in the old or broken phone to a phone retailer. If you prefer to go direct, you can get a free mail satchel at Australia Post outlets or print the online label and post it yourself.

Mobile Muster also have more information about the recycling process and what it accepted. It includes chargers, batteries and even smart watches.

See how much phone waste you can recycle from your place.
Also, if you missed War on Waste, see the full episode on iView.