How does Recycling help my Corporate Responsibility?
Corporate Social Responsibility ("CSR") shapes the identity of organisations and are increasingly integrated into the business strategy of successful Corporations. The field of responsible business practice is one of the most dynamic and challenging subjects corporate leaders are facing today and possibly one of the most important ones for shaping the future of our world.
Corporate Social Responsibility ("CSR") represents the way companies achieve enhanced ethical standards and a balance of economic, environmental and social imperatives addressing the concerns and expectations of their stakeholders. Corporate governance reflects the way companies address legal responsibilities and therefore provides the foundations upon which CSR and corporate sustainability practices can be built to enhance responsible business operations.
Mobile Phones are typically used for only 18 months before being replaced. Most of them will initially be stored away in cupboards and drawers, creating a stockpile of used phones that could end up in the trash.
What is the big deal about Mobile Phone recycling?
Waste from Mobile Phone products is a subject of concern around the world. While this segment of the waste stream generally accounts for less than 0.1 percent of municipal waste in industrialized countries, it is growing much faster than the waste stream as a whole.
Moreover, it contains many toxic substances, including arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, zinc, and brominated flame retardants, which can be released into the air and groundwater when burned in incinerators or disposed of in landfills, creating threats to human health and the environment.
Finally, separating out the toxic materials in these products and disposing of them as hazardous waste is very costly.
Mobile Phones are complicated devices that include a printed circuit board (PCB), liquid-crystal display panel (LCD), keypad, antenna, speaker, microphone and a battery. The PCB and LCD together account for 98% of the mobile phone's environmental impacts in production and recycling. These components contain persistent and bio-accumulative toxic chemicals, (PBT's), which have been associated with cancer and other reproductive, neurological and developmental disorders.
Arsenic (in chips made from gallium arsenide), antimony, beryllium, brominated flame retardants, cadmium, lead (used in the solder that joins the parts), nickel, palladium, silver, tantalum, zinc and mercury are contained in components that make up a mobile phone in one way or other. These components when discarded leak into groundwater from landfills, while toxins from incinerated mobile phones pollute the air, damaging our natural resources and severely impacting the human-food chain.
In addition many batteries contain cadmium or lead, which are classified by the US EPA as the two most hazardous elements as they are probable human carcinogens, are toxic to wildlife, and it can pass through the food chain to humans, causing lung, liver, and kidney damage, and even death at high exposure levels. Cadmium can leak into waterways from landfills and enter the atmosphere during incineration and recycling processes.
When you recycle your Mobile Phone, you provide an affordable first-time communications device to families and individuals in the developing world, improving local economies, quality of life and their personal safety.
Phones that cannot be put into re-use are recycled for their components, saving energy, which in turn reduces the production of Green House Gases (GHG), which is ultimately warming the planet.
Recycling also fulfils all pending and current legislation that governs the cycle of electrical waste in the environment. These include the WEEE directive (Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) and national waste management legislation.
Ensuring that today's Mobile Phone technology never becomes tomorrow's environmental problem, Greener Solutions provides "The environmental answer for a Mobile world".
Please ensure that you remove all SIM cards prior to posting the phone. All SIM cards received by Greener Solutions will be immediately destroyed as Greener Solutions complies with the Data Protection Act.
The Mobile Phone recycling project is FREE. Greener Solutions provides the Freeost recycling envelopes and manages all of the collections and recycling.
