Why It Is Important To Recycle Your Old Used Smartphones [Infographic]

I remember back in 2012 when I read an article on Mashable about how by the end of the year, there would be more smartphones than people in the world. The study used to back up that statement was the Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2012 – 2017 by Cisco. Now that we are into 2013, I’m sure there are more phones than people. It’s more important than ever to recycle our old, used smartphones.

After reading this infographic called The Rise Of Smartphone Recycling by Love2Recycle, you will start to understand why it is so important to recycle our used smartphones. However, their is a catch to that. Recycling used smartphones has gotten somewhat of a bad rap, but it’s not because of the recycling itself. It’s because people don’t realize that their used smartphones may still contain private information (like passwords, email, bank information, pictures, etc.). As a result, they often times hand their phone off to someone to recycle without first wiping it clean, which can obviously be a problem.

You wouldn’t recycle a used laptop without first removing or wiping the hard drive, right? It’s the same with your smartphone. Depending on where you live, there are many places that will accept your old smartphones for recycling. You can click on the link for the creators of this infographic (above), you can go to Recycle My Smartphone, or you can read this article on PC Magazine called How To Reuse Or Recycle Your Old Tech to find out even more options.

The average time a smartphone is used in the United States is 18 months. The average time in the UK is 29 months. At the rate smartphone companies keep manufacturing upgrades combined with our tech obsession, in a few years from now, we could be overloaded with used smartphones. Old phones tossed in drawers around the world could become the high tech cockroaches on our planet. Yuck.