Old mobile phone recycling too difficult to use the deposit system can be solved

"Sohu It News" Beijing time August 29 news, foreign media published an article that is sent to landfills or incinerators in the number of discarded mobile phones more than 100 million, this approach in the cause of waste of resources at the same time, but also caused a great environmental pollution. Therefore, the need to take stronger incentives to enable consumers to recycle old equipment, the introduction of a mandatory mobile phone deposit system may be a good solution. Here are the details of the article: Will you throw gold, silver or other precious metals into the bin? A lot of people don't do that in a conscious way. But you throw away your old phone without knowing that it contains a lot of recyclable metal. According to statistics, ordinary Americans throw away a mobile phone every two years, only one-tenth of them are dismantled and recycled. Although the metal value of each cell phone is not high, the number of handsets that are eventually sent to landfills or incinerators is huge-about 135 million in 2010, according to the EPA, which leads to $ hundreds of millions of worth of resources wasted each year. Digging up landfills is expensive and inefficient, so consumers need stronger incentives to recycle old equipment. The mandatory mobile-phone deposit system may provide this incentive. Recycling agencies use cash to exchange old handsets, but few know that there are such institutions. Even if you know, the money you get is not enough to drive them to spend time and energy finding old phones and going to the Recycle Bin. In fact, old phone recycling prices are not even enough to drive to the Recycle Bin. Conversely, a 25 dollar deposit is a powerful incentive. The deposit must be paid in the case of a mobile phone, so it will also increase the awareness of the intrinsic value of mobile devices. More importantly, the return of old mobile phones is beneficial to a larger proportion of the world's population, whether they agree with the purpose of protecting resources. If people spend real money on old phones, they won't be able to easily throw them away. Of course, such rules may encounter some resistance, and handset makers will argue that the deposit system increases the cost of the product and therefore suppresses demand, especially for poorer customers. But they can make a profit elsewhere: if people continue to throw away valuable resources at random, the price of mobile phones-not to mention other electronic devices-is bound to rise. This is because the problem of electronic waste has exceeded the waste of the metal itself. The mining and production of metals is a high-cost energy-intensive industry that usually produces damaging side effects of ecosystems. Inevitably, refining copper ore is more than twice times more energy intensive than recycled copper. In addition, mobile phone batteries contain toxic substances, including cobalt, lead and zinc and other heavy metals. If a cell phone is burnt to ashes or buried in a landfill, these substances can seep into soil and groundwater, seriously endangering human health and the environment. The implementation of the deposit system has allowed Germany to minimise the impact of uncontrolled toxic car batteries, and similar arrangements can help keep toxic cell phone batteries out of the waste stream. In fact, the deposit system has proved to be effective in promoting the recovery of multiple products. In many countries, consumptionPeople need to pay a small deposit to the glass and aluminum cans. The introduction of the plastic bottle deposit system in Germany has significantly improved the recycling rate of plastics. The mobile deposit system can be taken as the first step in a wider system and gradually expanded to all consumer electronics products, which are half to be recycled. Higher levels of precious metals in larger equipment, such as computers and televisions, are essential to encourage an effective system for the rational disposal of end-of-life products. Of course, before the introduction of mobile phone deposit system, we need to solve some practical problems. For example, what should be done with a mobile phone that has not been paid a deposit, whether or not the deposit was paid because it had been purchased before the deposit system was launched, or because the mobile phone was purchased from abroad? One solution is to report the serial number of all mobile phones that have been paid a deposit. The benefits of increased recovery are necessarily higher than the corresponding management costs. The mobile deposit system will promote recycling, reduce mining, conserve resources, and limit toxic waste. So why do policymakers not immediately urge each other to ensure the implementation of this system? (Joker)