Recycling insights: what our poll told us about old mobile phone habits

By Planet Ark 7 November 2024

Ever look inside your drawer and wonder how your old, unused phone ended up forgotten there? In October, Planet Ark conducted a social media poll and found that 69 per cent of participants have recycled a phone before; however, 62 per cent of those who hadn’t said they kept it.

We investigated further to determine the most common barriers to mobile phone recycling.   

1. People think their phone may hold some value 

If you, like 27 per cent of our participants, haven’t recycled a phone before because you believe it may hold some value, consider passing it down to family members, donating it to charity, or even trading it in. If you suspect your broken phone could still be salvaged, think about taking it to a repair shop.    Just don't let your old phone gather dust in your drawer. The greatest value your phone could hold is for the environment. Mobile phones are made of various metals, leading some people to believe they hold value if retrieved. In reality, they only hold a very small amount of each material. While a tiny bit of lithium may not have much monetary value for you, the reuse of these materials through recycling saves us having to extract them from our planet.    

2. Concerns for privacy and data security 

Our phones store layers of personal information, so being concerned about data privacy is completely valid. In fact, 41 per cent of our participants were most worried about data security when dropping off their phones for recycling.  

Nevertheless, recycling old mobile phones with MobileMuster keeps your data safe. Before you recycle your old mobile phone, it’s best to ensure that you remove personal information. But even if you cannot remove your data, it will be automatically erased from the device via shredding during MobileMuster’s recycling process. 

3. Don’t know to recycle a mobile phone 

Roughly 18 per cent of our participants haven’t recycled their phones before as they don’t know how.   MobileMuster has thousands of recycling drop-off points all over Australia, including retailer stores that sell mobile phones: Optus, Telstra, and Vodafone.    In most recycling centres, devices will be disassembled manually. Each component is recycled separately, from circuit boards, metal, glass, plastics, and batteries. These materials will be recovered and repurposed to build various new products, such as new electronics, glass bottles, park benches, and more. 

Happy recycling!