According to Wikipedia’s entry on world population, there are about 6.6 billion people on Earth. According to market research firm, Strategy Analytics, 1.1 billion cell phones were sold in 2007. That means, that assuming that no one had a mobile before, 1/6 of the people in the world would now have one. Of course, that’s not the case, and it’s pretty easy to assume that well over that number currently have cell phones. Pretty amazing. It wasn’t that long ago (early 90s) that cell phones were these heavy brick-sized devices that sat in your car and were hardly portable. We’ve certainly come a long way.
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This report is astounding – and that number is only going to grow. In the US people replace their phone once every 18 months. They are ubiquitous and very re-usable! But many languish is sock drawers or worse, landfills. At INFORM, Inc. we’ve been working on the immense issue of the health and environmental impacts of cell phone waste since 2002, when we put out Waste in the Wireless World and Calling all Cell Phones in 2003.
We’ve just put out a video called The Secret Life of Cell Phones which you can watch at secret-life.org. There is a great deal of wealth to be made in recapturing materials at the end of life. In fact, it only takes about 200 old dead cell phones to create a good sized gold wedding band! Cell phone waste – not handled properly has immense human health and environmental implications as well.
Please take a look at the video and tell us what you think!