This, of course, solves two problems: it takes the handset off your hands and keeps another unwanted phone potentially out of a waste landfill site. Everybody wins; especially as you may find yourself getting cash for something you had considered worthless.

There is, however, a downside to the phone recycling industry: the better the handset, the higher the price. If, for example, you wanted to ‘recycle’ an iPhone, you would be looking in the region of $200. However… who wants to recycle something that is a recent handset? You’d be better off selling it on eBay – even if it is broken. No, what most of us need is a way to dispose of our really old handsets – the bricks we had when we considered text messaging alone the very forefront of technology. These handsets are worth $10-$15 at most, and with delivery costs it just isn’t worth it.

So we need a solution: something that gets rid of our old handsets from clogging up our homes, but keeps the phones out of landfill waste. If you phone is still in working order, contact a charity and donate it to them. You won’t get any money for it, but a little altruism goes a long way – and that phone will be put to excellent use.

Throughout the last ten years, the average 30 year old adult is estimated to have had six different cell phone handsets. So what happens to those handsets that have had their day, replaced by shiny new models? While some consumers may be savvy and list their unwanted cells for sale on auction sites like eBay, the vast majority of people will throw the phones away – often by simply dropping them in with their household trash.

This extra pressure on an already over-burdened world of waste has lead to a rise in ‘phone recycling’. There are numerous companies that specialize in taking unwanted handsets and making them useful again – or, at the very lease, recycling the component parts and preventing them from ending up in landfill.

Most of these companies will pay anything from $20 to $200 – depending on your handset – for your old, unused phone. Some companies will not require the phone to be in working order; so you really have nothing to lose, and a lot of cash and environmental points to gain. So before you throw last year’s cell away, see what you could get for it and recycle.

In the UK – and in most major first world countries – the conventional means of disposing of household and business waste is by using “land fill”. Essentially, land is dug up, waste is insert in to the hole and then the land is refilled. A fairly abhorrent practice, but so far the best that the world has come up with in terms of waste disposal.

The problem in the United Kingdom, however, is that their small land mass and their reliance on using landfill to dispose of waste has caused a problem. These two facts are not compatible, and before long (some say in as soon as seven years), the UK is quite literally going to run out of land to dispose their waste in. The consequences of this would be extreme; land previously dismissed for landfill use due to its heritage or attractive qualities will have to become the property of the waste of a nation, and there is also the unseemly fact that eventually even the ‘good’ land will run out.

The answer, of course, is recycling. When waste is recycled and used again, there is no need for it to ever grace the fields of a country and become part of a landfill.

If that isn’t a good enough reason to recycle glass, then think on this. Glass is the only material that is 100% efficient in its recycling. That is to say that if you recycle a glass bottle, you will get the same standard of glass from the process that you put into it – and this cycle holds permanently so the same container could be recycled forever with no loss of quality.

If you go to the supermarket today and buy something in a glass bottle, the likelihood is that seventy per cent of the glass in that bottle will have come from a recycling process. On the other hand, to make glass from scratch – a process that features heating substances to a temperature of more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit – it requires energy and causes a lot of pollution.

Recycled glass is also probably the safest recycled material of all, because it has very little chemical interaction with anything it comes into contact with. This means that very little newly-recycled glass has to be disposed of because it does not come up to an acceptable standard.

An interesting fact is that it takes eight tonnes of bauxite – the raw material which is turned into aluminium – to make one tonne of aluminium. This means that making aluminium from scratch takes a lot of energy and depletes existing bauxite reserves at quite a rate. By recycling aluminium, it is estimated that a saving in energy of 92% is made compared to making it from bauxite. This is a quite astounding saving in energy terms, and when you consider the amount of bauxite it takes to make virgin aluminium, it only makes sense to recycle.

Aluminium cans are present in just about every household in the country. It would be an amazing change if even half of the people who drink or eat goods from aluminium containers were to take those containers to be recycled – saving the country and the individual money and effort in the long run.

Scientists are working on a system of making fuel from biomass – a word to describe any materials we dispose of that may be able to biodegrade fast and have another use. As things stand, biomass fuel is still very much a niche industry – but if it gets the opportunity it could be the solution to two problems in one. Less burning of fossil fuels means less harm to the air quality and less contribution to global warming. The use of garbage of fuel means more space in landfills.

Recent advances in the recycling of paper have included “deinking”, a system which draws the ink from newsprint as part of the recycling process. The outcome of this is that recycled paper is now of a better quality than ever, making it usable in a wider range of processes and lessening the need to cut down trees for the purposes of making virgin paper. The logic inherent in doing this is obvious. More trees means less carbon dioxide, more recycled paper means less pollution – allowing us to cut the amount of pollutants in our environment.

The idea is that, when placed in landfill, the substances we throw away will biodegrade – that is, they will decompose and eventually form part of the soil. Up to a point, this is true, but one reason why people are favoring recycling is that our landfills are very quickly filling up. Not only does this mean that we are throwing away more than is decomposing, but it also means that the landfills become very tightly packed – thus not allowing oxygen – a vital part of efficient biodegrading – to get through.

A recent study took a look at various landfills and the rubbish that was found on lower levels of the compacted garbage. Some of what was found included fruit, veg and meat that was over a quarter of a century old and still recognizable. Newspapers were found from the 1950s which were still readable. In order for the process of biodegrading to be truly effective, more space would be needed -–something that we aren’t going to get if we keep piling recyclable garbage on top of what is already in landfills.

There are some senses in which partisan considerations drive one’s views on the environment. Recycling programs cost money to create, and need to be done at a municipal level. This means that they will be funded from taxes, and someone who makes tax a primary concern may well argue that they are being taxed for no good reason.

On the other hand, recycling does have an impact on the environment, and the environment is one thing which is very clearly communal – we need to share the world with other people. So if we are polluting, we aren’t doing our best by our fellow people. Recycling is also a social issue.

There are political parties in most countries set up with the environment as a primary concern. Although they certainly have policies in all the other areas, they will be pigeonholed as being solely concerned with the environment, and one side will accuse them of being socialists while the other calls them conservatives. It is sometimes better to divorce the political aspect from your environmental attitudes, because it seems to be a distraction as much as anything.

Well, when we create the materials that recycling is most concerned with – paper, plastic, glass and others – this process is done in the main by burning fossil fuels. Natural gas, coal, oil and gasoline are all required in part to drive this process. When we burn fossil fuels, carbon dioxide is released into the environment and it is believed that carbon dioxide is one of the major contributors to global warming.

Put simply, recycling materials takes less energy than creating them from scratch, as they have already been through the major change required to create them. This means that we don’t need to use as many fossil fuels, and we stand less chance of contributing in any way to global warming.

It is easy to see why some people would have their doubts about global warming – that it is happening at all, and that it is being created by humans. However, the scientific consensus certainly leans towards global warming being man-made, and given that recycling is cost-effective, it makes sense to hedge your bets.

Certain materials – not least paper and plastic – cannot be made from scratch without using materials that we take out of our planet. Taking these materials can affect the planet in many undesirable ways and, equally concerning, they are neither self-replenishing nor possible to manufacture.
That means once they are gone, they’re gone. When someone talks of non-renewable resources, they mean things like the petroleum required to make plastic, or the trees required to make paper from scratch. You can replant trees – but you’ll have noticed they take a while to grow – but you can’t put petroleum back.
Once you have taken those resources out of the earth, that’s not the end of the deal. The process of turning them into something else – petroleum into plastic – takes a process that costs money and requires a lot of energy, which in itself will often come from non-renewable sources.

The cycle of creating these materials from scratch, then, adds up to a false economy which will always leave the planet poorer. Without even mentioning the controversial topic of global warming, it is instantly clear just how recycling has become so necessary, and such a burning issue.