Collective Good

I just read about a cool service called Collective Good that recycles spare mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs. As this TerraBlog entry points out, this is valuable for a couple of important reasons:

• Recycling reduces waste. There are about 200 million mobile phone users in the US, and they replace their cell phones every 18 months. This adds up to about 130 million surplus cell phones per year, weighing about 65,000 tons. The cumulative total of retired mobile phones in the US is about 600 million and growing.


• If not recycled, these cell phones will end up in landfills, where they may leach toxic materials such as mercury and lead.


• Cell phones contain precious metals such as gold. Reclaiming these metals reduces pressure for environmentally destructive mining.

The intriguing thing to me is that Collective Good pays people for the used devices by making charitable donations or giving people content (like ringtones). That's the real trick in my mind around programs like this or solutions to global warming in general - giving people an economic incentive to do the right thing. Perhaps that's where I'll be able to do my part over time - coming up with good business models that are also environmentally sound.