Spring cleaning is a time not only to straighten up your home, but also to get rid of unwanted or out-of-date items. It’s easy enough to clean up your home simply by rearranging things, sorting things into drawers and cupboards, and maybe buying a few new decorations or pieces of furniture.
However, to achieve a more lasting effect with your straightening up, it is a good idea to really sort through your possessions and pick out a few things to get rid of. You may be surprised at how many items you find that you can throw out, or even recycle. For example, one sort of item that many people forget about, that can be very useful when recycled, is old mobile phones. O2 has been emphasising recycling benefits recently, and it is actually surprising how much the environment can benefit from careful disposal of old electronics.
To begin with, your old electronics, such as out-of-use mobile phones, are not doing any good if left alone in drawers or cupboards never to be used again. However, if you recycle them or donate them, they may well be put to use as perfectly functional phones for people in less fortunate regions of the world. Many used mobile phones are distributed in third world countries, for example, which not only provides people with cheap phones, but cuts down on the necessity to manufacture more devices.
Recycling your old mobile phones can also be very useful simply as a conservation of materials, both good and bad. Various metals and plastics, including gold, silver, palladium, and others, can be saved simply from the recycling of old electronics. Additionally however, harmful materials that can be found in mobile phone batteries – such as arsenic and mercury – can also be contained, and stopped from harming the environment, if you recycle your devices. If you simply throw your old phones away, then none of these materials can be appropriately conserved or contained.
Finally, there is also the sheer number of mobile phones to consider. While you of course can only control your own possessions, the idea of thousands and thousands of people each year putting old phones in the trash or keeping them in storage is extremely wasteful. This essentially means that huge amounts of material are simply lost to no use each year.
So, this spring as you go about cleaning and setting up your home for the coming year, consider looking through your old possessions for items, like old mobile phones, that could be put to use with recycling.
