You can donate it at almost any cell phone store. They will either recycle, reuse, donate to a shelter or dispose of safely. Better than filling up the landfill with toxins if you are never going to use it.
So you think....
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/11/18/electronics.trash.ap/index.html SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Most Americans think they're helping the earth when they recycle their old computers, televisions and cell phones. But chances are they're contributing to a global trade in electronic trash that endangers workers and pollutes the environment overseas.
While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.
"It is being recycled, but it's being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine," said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, the Seattle-based environmental group that tipped off Hong Kong authorities. "We're preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world."
Want to see horrific recycling techniques, look at how they break ships at Alang, India. They basically just drive them up on the beach and let workers go at them with torches and prybars, getting hydraulic fluids and toxins all over themselves, causing fires, whatever. No safety standards at all.
The beach community looks like something out of Mad Max, too. All the places where the workers live and drink are made out of salvage from ships, so it's a mad assemblage of metal plating, interior wood paneling from ocean liners, portholes, hatches for doors, jury-rigged light fixtures from freighters and ocean liners both...
The magazine "The Atlantic" had an incredibly well-written story about what it's like there, the oily, smoky post-apocalyptic feel of the place, all overshadowed by the towering hulks of dead ships.
