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Like many of us, Bill Messett had a cell-phone graveyard.
His old phones weren't actually dead, but he certainly wasn't using them. Each was tossed into a drawer, along with all its chargers and accessories, when he upgraded to the next model every year or two.
Messett, 38, had the vague idea that he would use the most recent discarded model as a backup in case he lost his current phone. The rest, he sensed, had some value, which made him reluctant to part with them.
"I'm kind of packratty in that sense," said Messett, a Miami insurance broker. "I don't like to throw anything away."
Messett found his solution this summer while surfing the Internet. He exchanged two of his newer model phones at RipMobile.com for about $50 in Circuit City gift certificates and donated the rest to RipMobile's affiliated site, CollectiveGood, in return for a small tax deduction.
What to do with old phones is no small issue. The United States alone has more than 200 million cell phone subscribers, and about 5 million of those change carriers each month, which usually means getting a new phone. Even when they don't change carriers, people often change phones to take advantage of improved technology, innovative features and changing fashions.
"The average user gets a new phone about every 18 months," said James Mosieur, CEO of CellForCash.com, "and they end up retiring the old one."
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That's left the United States with hundreds of millions of used cell phones, only a fraction of which have been resold, recycled or reused. Californians, for example, throw away 44,000 cell phones every day.
"Eighty percent have not been repurposed," said Seth Heine, founder and CEO of CollectiveGood/RipMobile, who estimates there are 750 million used cell phones floating around the United States. "They literally go into people's drawers."
Such cell cemeteries are a problem for a number of reasons:
Environmental concerns. Eventually, owners may get fed up with the clutter and toss their wireless handsets into the nearest trash can -- the worst possible outcome.
Cell phones and chargers contain a variety of toxic materials that can poison the soil, water and air. Cell-phone manufacturers are trying to make new handsets more environmentally friendly, said Joe Farren, public affairs director for CTIA -- The Wireless Association, by phasing out the use of lead and cadmium. Still, you should assume that anything with a circuit board, like a phone or a computer, is a caldron of caustic stuff and try to keep it out of the landfill.
Security concerns. Today's phones can store all kinds of private data, from passwords to e-mails to that racy photo you snapped of your girlfriend. Anyone who gets his or hands on your old phone could potentially access this stuff.
Security is an issue for those who would sell or donate phones, too. Trust Digital, which provides mobile security software, recently said it gleaned data from nine of 10 smart phones and personal digital assistants the company purchased on eBay as an experiment. Among the 27,000 pages of data the company retrieved were e-mails between a married man and his girlfriend, details about pending corporate deals and bank account numbers and passwords, according to The Associated Press.
The kind of simple reset users often perform to erase data doesn't scrub the information from many devices' flash memory, the company said. The information can be reclaimed using software available on the Internet. A user needs to perform "an advanced hard reset," which is typically outlined in the phone's user manual, to permanently clear the memory.
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