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lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>On the toxicity of cell phones, also see the first-of-its-kind report issued by the Basel Action Network earlier this year, as well as the reports issued by href="http://www.informinc.org/">Inform, sz lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>BAN. "Mobile Toxic Waste: Recent Findings on the Toxicity of End-of-Life Cell Phones." (April 2004). < "MS Mincho";mso-ansi-language:EN-US'> href="http://www.ban.org/Library/mobilephonetoxicityrep.pdf"> style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>http://www.ban.org/Library/mobilephonetoxicityrep.pdf> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>MacDonald, Jay. "Recycled cell phones save money (and the planet)." MSN News (Aug 2004). < href="http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Savemoney/P90843.asp"> style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Savemoney/P90843.asp> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>A refurbished phone may free you from costly contracts and a variety of fees -- and keep landfills cleaner. 100 million phones a year add up. style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Want to equip the whole family with cell phones without going into debt? style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>With a little digging, you can find great deals on used cell phones with voice mail, caller ID and call waiting, all without the things you don't want: monthly bills, credit checks, lengthy contracts, age restrictions, activation fees and complicated minutes plans. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Cellular providers such as AT&T Wireless, Cingular and U.S. Cellular, as well as resellers such as TracFone, frequently run online specials on refurbished phones as a way to boost sales, particularly of prepaid calling plans. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Granted, your used mobile phone won't have all the up-to-the-nanosecond bells and whistles of the latest camera phones and gaming models. But for basic calling, voice mail and even text messaging, your used unit will be indistinguishable from the top of the line. Only you will know that you paid little or no money for it. style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Case in point: TracFone offers a reconditioned Nokia 5125 cell phone and 100 prepaid anytime, anywhere minutes for $29.99 at its online store. Since that's the normal retail price of 100 TracFone minutes, you in effect get the Nokia handset for free. style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"It's a value, especially if it's an emergency phone," says TracFone's Sherri Pfefer. "Take families traveling in the summer: You go to a big amusement park and everybody splits up. For $30, you can give the other group a phone and be in constant communication with them and not have to worry. There's no monthly bill, no contract, no worry. You can activate the phone to whatever state you're going to, as long as the technologies match." style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Although your refurbished TracFone comes with a 30-day warranty instead of the usual one-year coverage, Pfefer says there's little risk involved. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"A majority of our refurbs are returns from customers back to the retailers that then get sent here," she says. "The majority of our phones have never been used; they were the wrong technology, they got them as a gift, things like that." lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>If you're not averse to signing on for a monthly plan, AT&T Wireless recently offered a refurbished Siemens C56 for $29.99 as part of its GoPhone plan. Cingular and U.S. Cellular also have made reconditioned cell phones available through their retail outlets. EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Used wireless world lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Used cellular phones may be little more than a curiosity here in the United States, but there is an unquenchable market for our castoffs in developing countries where landline phones are prohibitively expensive, according to Chuck Newman, CEO of ReCellular of Dexter, Mich., the nation's oldest and largest cell-phone refurbishing company. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"Price becomes a very attractive feature for anybody trying, often for the first time in their life, to have access to basic telephony," says Newman. "Certainly for the phones we are selling, this is more often than not their only phone." style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>ReCellular takes discarded handsets from charitable collection drives, retailer returns and trade-ins, refurbishes them and sells them to buyers around the world. The discards they receive run the gamut from antique to tricked-out. style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"The typical phone that we receive is maybe 18 months old. The newer ones, we tend to remanufacture and sell here in the U.S., and the older ones go overseas to be used for basic voice telephony," he says. "About 70% of our products end up overseas somewhere: South America, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, China, India." style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>This year, ReCellular will recycle over 4 million handsets and return $10 million to the charities that collect them. mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"For us, change is good," Newman says. "The shorter the period of time that someone owns a phone before they change it, the better it is for us. Unlike conventional manufacturers, our sales are not limited by the number of units we can sell; it's the number of units we can buy. The market is pretty much insatiable relative to the number of phones that we can get our hands on." style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>That's because, until recently, most U.S. cellular phones operated on either TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) or CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology, while the rest of the world's cell phones were GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"It's actually a bit of a frustration for us," Newman admits. "The U.S. technology is only utilized by about 20% to 25% of the world's cellular subscribers, so consequently we can't sell to most of the wireless users in the world; we're confined to this narrow slice. As GSM gets better established here, we will have more GSM phones that we can export." style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Save the cellular planet lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>There's another compelling reason to consider a used cell phone: You may help save the planet. style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Cell phones contain a number of toxic components, including lead, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium and antimony. When buried in landfills or incinerated, these substances present a serious threat to the food chain, even in small quantities. style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>According to Bette Fishbein, senior fellow for Inform, a nonprofit environmental group, the sheer number of handsets (1 billion worldwide) multiplied by their brief lifespan (18 months on average) and easy disposability makes cell phones the perfect example of our failure to address recycling of all electronic gadgets. Inform estimates that 100 million cell phones will be retired in 2005 alone. By contrast, only 2.5 million phones were collected by the nation's four major take-back programs from 1999 to early 2003. mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"The good news is, the cell phone industry does acknowledge that it has a responsibility. They have set up the Wireless Foundation that runs a lot of take-back programs," says Fishbein. "Industry has traditionally taken the stand that waste is a municipal responsibility; why look at us? The fact that the wireless industry has a program is significant. The negative aspect is that the amount they take back is totally insignificant." style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>So far, worldwide environmental initiatives have surrounded, if not conquered, the problem. The Basel Convention, the United Nations environmental initiative, prohibits its signatories from exporting toxic scrap. Two new European measures, the WEEE Directive (Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) and the RoHS Directive (Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances), set a reuse-recycling target of 65% for all electrical and electronic products and a target for the elimination of certain toxic substances by 2006. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"Any technological changes that are going to come out of the WEEE-RoHS directives are going to have direct impact here," Fishbein says. "If industry switches to an alternative to lead solder, that's going to be global, so the design changes being pressed forward by WEE/RoHS are probably going to be applied here as well." lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>As 'churn' increases, so do changes mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>What is more problematic is getting U.S. manufacturers to agree on a collection model. Some prefer to do so on a voluntary, industry-wide scale through the Wireless Foundation. Others prefer to run their own take-back programs. But since current collection efforts together only manage to recover a negligible percentage of all discarded phones, it's safe to say there is room for improvement. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>What's more, the new U.S. cell phone portability rule is likely to result in more "churn" (users jumping to different service providers), and hence more discarded cell phones in the near future. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Inform continues to lobby for extended producer responsibility that would put the onus on industry, not only to retrieve its cell phones, but to redesign them so that toxic components such as rechargeable batteries can be easily removed. lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Include the chargers in that redesign, as well. mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>"We've been pushing for universal adapters so you can use the same chargers for different products," say Fishbein. "When you're talking about waste, the chargers are a huge problem." 9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>Newman believes ReCellular's eco-friendly, for-profit business model may help the industry clean up its disposable problem. mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'> lang=EN-US style='font-size:9.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-ansi-language: EN-US'>"I'm very, very hard pressed to think of any other enterprise that serves so many needs. We're helping the environment with our no-landfill policy," he says. "Last year, between 250 and 350 tons of cell phones were kept out of landfills. So the environment is winning." lang=EN-US style='mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>