Recycling your cell phone helps protect the environment in a number of ways. Cell phones are made from valuable resources such as precious metals, copper, and plastics—all of which require energy to mine and process. Recovering these materials by recycling avoids the need to mine and process new materials, which in turn, conserves our natural resources, and avoids air and water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. For example, we would save the energy equivalent to the electricity used by more than 24,000 US homes in a year.

Cell phones have a number of different metals in them which can be recycled. For every million cell phones we recycle, 35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium can be recovered. Recovering metals from used cell phones can reduce extraction of raw metals from the earth.*

*www.EPA.gov