Plant my Phone?

Photo courtesy: Care2

Here is one of the best recycling programs around. Please let everyone you know who uses a cellphone know about Plant My Phone. The article is reprinted from Care2.

Plant My Phone is a new company designed to reduce the very large number of old cell phones that end up in landfills. The idea is both simple and potentially far-reaching. You send them your old, unwanted cell phone for free using their postage-paid self-mailer bags. The free postage-paid plastic bags are available in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Medford, MA, Corvallis, and New Orleans. If you don’t live in these cities, you can print a free shipping label from their website, or request a free self-mailer bag to be sent to you. Then mail in your old phone.

Their site says mailing in an average two-year old phone will result in the planting of fifteen trees. A first generation Apple iPhone in good condition equates to the planting of 79 trees, and a Nokia80 equals about 30, (depending on the condition). You can look at the phone to trees conversion table to see if your phone is there.

The mailed phones are recycled, and their materials are sold to fund tree planting. They say focusing on cell phone recycling is important because, “…of the 140 Million old cellphones each year, only 10% get recycled.” Cell phones contain heavy metals which are toxic to the environment.

The types of trees planted are: Cocoa, Coffee, Banana, Orange, Cedar, Teak, Mahogany, Oak, Acacia, Eucalyptus, Laurel and Leucaena. Their trees are planted in twelve countries: Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, Zambia, India, Philippines and Haiti.

PlantMyPhone has a goal of planting seven billion trees. They are an official partner of the United Nations Environment Programme’s: Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign.