What did you do with your old phone

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According to statistics, 2 billion smartphone users replace their old devices every 11 months on average, which means that the old phones are either thrown away in some corner of a drawer and forgotten, or discarded outright. And less than 10% of those old phones are recycled, with the precious metals being extracted and reused. Looking at the amount of resources in a single smartphone, it might not seem like much, but when the number of discarded smartphones reaches a certain scale, the resources contained within them become quite substantial. 1 million mobile phones can provide 16 tons of copper, 350 kg of silver, 34 kg of gold, and 15 kg of palladium. The challenge in recovering and utilizing these precious metals lies in finding safe and economical ways to process these elements and materials. A large portion of electronic waste (including mobile phones) is exported or discarded in some developing countries, such as China. Foreign media have conducted in-depth reports on some villages and towns in China; for example, Guiyu Town in the southeast is considered to be the world’s largest e-waste processing site. The local residents make a living by recovering gold from circuit boards, and the processes involved include breaking down those circuit boards and using highly corrosive acids for separation – activities that cause pollution. 81.8% of children under the age of 6 in this town suffer from lead poisoning, and the highly corrosive acids that are used end up flowing into nearby rivers, causing pollution that is difficult to resolve even after many years. Even if these wastes are not discarded carelessly, recycling them on-site where they are generated as e-waste is not an easy task. Taking Australia as an example, the industrial melting involved in recycling e-waste is costly and environmentally unfriendly.