The Problem
Americans throw out 151 million mobile phones a year.
That’s 416,000 per day.
That’s 4.8 mobile phones. Every. Single. Second.
Only about 1 in 10 smartphones are properly recycled.
Recycling a smartphone is a manual process in which it needs to be manually de-manufactured, which is time-consuming, expensive and dangerous.
If recyclers could automate the battery and hazard removal process, then a smartphone could be thrown into a shredder and follow a standard metals recycling process.
Increasing recycling of smartphones and small electronic devices depends on removing this bottleneck.
