Most blog entries are about us giving you information, but this time it's the other way 'round--we've got a question we'd like your informed opinion on.
According to the European Battery Recycling Association via this Reuters news clip, battery recycling efforts are hitting a snag in Europe because Europeans are hanging on to their old phones, even after buying new ones. A battery can't be recycled if it's sitting in someone's drawer collecting dust.
Our question is: Why are Europeans keeping their old cell phones? How do the cultural differences of an entire continent influence consumer behavior vis-a-vis outdated technology that would be, to most North American or Asian residents, not worth keeping around? Let us know your thoughts, particularly those of you raised in or intimately familiar with Europe. Thanks!
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Also if you throw away the battery then the phone is useless - might as well keep them together in a drawer.
PS. Please don't take away free phones in Europe, just give more perks if we recycle!!
ALL european cell phones have something known a a SIM card, holding their phone number, phone book, and other phone related info (these can be found in US cell phones provided by T-mobile). Sim cards can be moved from phone to phone easily. Making it so that no cell phone is ever rendered useless, the way an American phone is when the service is moved.
So when europeans answer simply that they keep it as a back up they are saying everything. They have the OPTION to keep a backup phone because their old phones aren't rendered USELESS by money-grubbing phone companies who try to keep the technology under wraps in the US.
Unfortunately, they have succeeded.
I imagine it also has something to do with the way the cellphone market works: it mostly focuses marketing on attracting fashion-sensitive consumers in their teens and twenties, since they are more likely to quickly swap a phone for a newer, more fashionable model (this seems to be less so for the 'professional' user, who is probably more interested in functionality and dependability). Promoting this behaviour (i.e. making people believe they're dorks for not having the latest model) means that more and more cellphones become obsolete while still in perfect working order.
In terms of Dutch mentality, something will need to be gained from giving up an obsolete but functioning cellphone, if people are to turn in their stash. Collecting phones for charity seems to work, and people are certainly willing to part with their phone in exchange for a discount on their new phone (I know I was).
As for the European Battery Recycling Association's wonderment: they can be perfectly willing to increase the recycle rate, but if the EU is foolish enough to just demand certain rates without offering the legislation needed to achieve that effect, the EU's and EBRA's efforts and concerns will have little effect. What I'm getting at, is that I think the time is right to overcome the cellphone industries (powerful) objections and force them to take responsibility for their products.
As I mentioned before, taking in old phones in exchange for a discount seems to persuade people to part with their old phones. Currently, this is being used every now and then by individual shops as a promotional tool, but the system could also be used on a much larger scale by the cellphone companies themselves. Being forced (since it will cost them money) by law to recover their products, it seems to me that the easiest way of doing so, would be to persuade their customers to turn in their old phones as soon as they buy new ones.
I know for me, the reason I have a sack of batteries is that I don't know where to take them. The only battery recycling drop box I know of is in Lasalle, at least a 45 minute drive or 1h 15 min. subway ride away in a neighborhood I never have need to visit. Therefore, I save batteries for a few years before getting them to recycling.
I think a good idea would be an internet/print recycling guide that would direct consumers to places for recycling of odd objects. Computers, monitors, TVs, batteries, fluorescent bulbs (mercury people!), old smoke alarms (supposedly radioactive), batteries. I don't know where to take most of this stuff, but I know enough to NOT want to toss it in the ground.
Help!
WWII, at least in the UK, pretty much saw the birth of the concept of recycling on a huge national scale.
http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/
Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/helping%20the%20war%20effort.html
But as soon as peace broke out we happily went back to heaving everything into a landfill site. Recycling was seen as a wartime necessity and soon forgotten - but we just couldn't shake that phone-hoarding instinct, could we?
I think people are basically lazy with regards to recycling. Within a 100 metres of my flat I can recycle:
- Paper
- Organic waste
- Batteries
- Plastics
- Metal
All of which I do, normally on the way to do something else. To recycle my phone I'ld have to drive to somewhere on the outskirts of town (which maybe the starting point of another Euro vs. U.S. debate - it's commonly known over here that Americans drive everywhere! Maybe they have phone recycling bins next to the speaker-thing at the Krusty Burger drive-thru?!).
So, basically, my old phones are lying in a drawer, along with a first-generation iBook, a couple of round Macintosh mice, a HandSpring, a SCSI Zip Drive (100MB!), and an Apple Newton (in increasing order of age).
When nothing else fits in, I'll probably chuck it all in the boot and drive to the recycling center (although I think I'll hang on to the Newton).
I'd say more likely this simply may be phone-specific. Most European pre-pay phone plans only charge for outgoing calls- you can receive calls for free. When I lived in Holland, I had quite a few friends that would just go from one hand-me-down phone to the next, essentially for free, by using pre-pay sim cards that have no balances and only receiving calls. There may be just enough of a need to make it worthwhile keeping an old phone in the drawer for when a foreign relative visits.
2.takes to long to delete all.
3.as backup if new phone fails.
(From a north american guy that somehow became european, maybe).
After a year or two it becomes a great challenge to find a new battery for your old phone. Since you cannot find the battery to keep your art alive, and you have one that works, although maybe not as well as it once did, why would you give up possession of it? I personally would not.
1) They still work and it's a waste to throw them away.
2) They could be sold still but it's too much work.
3) Nobody is collecting them - no recycling policy.
4) They could be sent to friends/relatives in poorer countries.
5) You want to have a back-up phone for the case you loose/dislike/give away/don't get along with your new mobile phone.
6) We just can. We don't need the money.
7) It's too personal to give somebody else in a used state.
8) You might collect cell phones.
There are some of my reasons and guesses.
1-keeping old phone as backup
2-too expensive to trash, yet too old to sell for $$$
3-underground plot to take over _______ (whatever?)