If you have any old cell phones that you don’t need, this is a great time of year to get them to where they can do some good! Try doing a “phone swap” email/slack thread for your group/company. Some people might be looking for a low-cost upgrade (or downgrade! Some people want to reduce their smartphone usage by moving to a feature phone or flip phone)

It’s important to recycle old phones because they contain rare earth elements and metals like gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, tin, and zinc. Metals and rare earth elements especially, are difficult to mine and need a great deal of energy to extract- it is much cheaper and more sustainable to recover them from existing devices.

Here are some resources:

  1. greencitizen “GreenCitizen offers free cell phone recycling in the San Francisco Bay area at our Burlingame EcoCenter. SF Bay area businesses can also sign up for our convenient business pick-up.”
  2. WOMENinc “Used cell phones with batteries (no chargers, please!) – When people donate cell phones to us WOMAN, Inc. has the opportunity to earn some money by sending the phones to an organization who then sends us a check based on the value of the phone.”
  3. sfgate
  4. electronics.howstuffworks
  5. sfgoodwill
  6. Apple store The easiest way to recycle an old and worn-out iPhone is to bring it to an Apple store and hand it to a staff person there