Bury old phones in the back garden

Are mobile phone manufacturers turning into tree-hugging hippies? Perhaps not just yet, but the environmentalist in me likes to hear about local recycling intiatives such as MobileMuster and prototype designs such as an organic mobile phone cover that sprouts sunflower when planted in your garden.

Have a think for a moment about how many phones you have in your household, and how many times you've upgraded handsets since your first phone.

Unlike PCs, which family members can often share, mobile phones are individual commodities. It's becoming the norm -- if it isn't already -- in Australia for most households to have between two and four connected handsets on the go.

Compared to home theatre equipment, mobile phones have a much shorter life span, too. Where a decent television or stereo might last a decade -- my trusty stereo has been hanging in there producing good sound since 1993 -- I'd be willing to bet there aren't too many people walking down the street with a '90s "brick" phones stuffed in their pockets.

Reports suggest consumers replace their mobile phones on average every 18 to 24 months, either due to everyday wear-and-tear, or because of compelling additional features such as integrated cameras, colour screens or e-mail.

So the problem exists of what to do with your old phone when you upgrade. While many people give them away to friends or relatives, auction them on eBay to the highest bidder or leave them in the bottom drawer in the cupboard gathering dust, others recycle them.

In Australia alone, over 330 tonnes of mobile phone handsets, batteries and accessories were collected for recycling since 1999, according to the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA).

Of this, around 1.3 million batteries with a combined weight of about 48 tonnes containing toxic metal cadmium had been collected. The cadmium from just one mobile phone battery is enough to pollute 600,000 litres of water, and although cadmium was phased out of new batteries in the 1990s, hazardous batteries still surface.

Launched in December, MobileMuster is an official recycling initiative from the AMTA that aims to minimise the impact of mobile phones on the environment. Through partnerships in the telecommunications industry, the program has the support of thousands of drop-off centres, such as your local Crazy Johns outlet, through which mobile phone handsets, batteries and accessories are collected to recover the plastics and metals for use in manufacturing new products. So if you want to clear out some space in your cupboard and help out the environment, find the location of your nearest collection centre and recycle your old phones -- I think I've got about three or four to drop in myself.

While it's great to see a local initiative like this producing good results, it seems the UK is a bit ahead of the game regarding tree-hugging tech, with an exhibition called Dead Ringers opening up at London's Science Museum that focuses specifically on the issue of mobile phone recycling.

At the exhibition there are prototypes of lasagne sheet-like circuit boards, an NEC phone case created out of corn, and an environmentally friendly phone case with an implanted sunflower seed, so when you bury it in the ground, the seed sprouts and gets additional nutrients from the biodegrading cover. See some pictures in our phone recycling photo gallery.

Can you see us burying our phones? Heard of any other environmentally friendly tech endeavours in Australia? Have your say below.