IPhone sales may add to electronic waste

MINNEAPOLIS — Good reviews. People camped out to get one. And buzz that makes the launches of xBoxes, PlayStations or new Krispy Kreme stores pale in comparison.

If the iPhone lives up to its hype — Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., predicts that 10 million will be sold in the first 18 months — environmentalists and others fear an avalanche of electronic waste as never before, as consumers decide they no longer need their cell phones, BlackBerrys or iPods.

David Kutoff sees this as a teachable moment.

He’s president and CEO of Materials Processing Corp. in Eagan, Minn., which has collected electronic waste, or e-waste, for nearly 25 years.

“If I throw my one-pound cell phone in the garbage buried in a plastic bag, who’s going to notice? It’s not like a 25-inch TV,” said Kutoff, 29, who bought the business in January with partner Todd Schachtman, 33.

“But if everyone recycles their phones, close to 1.5 million pounds of cell phones won’t wind up in the garbage can,” he said. “It’s the difference between everybody saying, `Who cares?’ and everyone saying, `We can do our part.’ It’s all about education.”

Already the average American has three to five of them lying around, which stacks up to a nationwide total of 750 million unused phones just lying dormant.

Unfortunately, a lot of those phones go directly from the dresser drawer into the trash can. About 130 million a year meet that fate, according to the Environmental Protection Agency — even though the phones are filled with all sorts of toxic material.

The iPhone, which went on sale June 29, promises to be the ultimate all-in-one-gadget. It combines a cell phone, wireless Web browser, digital camera, music and media for $499 or $599.

E-cyclers like Kutoff aren’t waiting to find out if the product lives up to its reputation.

Cell phones already are the largest and fastest growing segment of the e-waste world, and keeping them out of the waste stream is becoming ever more difficult. Consumers, on average, get new phones every 18 months, though many recyclers think the turnover is much faster.

The sense of urgency is twofold. As a miner might have said, there’s gold in them there phones. And there are other valuable metals that are expensive and destructive to scrape out of the earth. If all the obsolete phones in storage were rounded up and recycled — some 500 million of them — the metals would amount to a treasure worth $340 million, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Many cell phones also are loaded with hazardous materials like cadmium, arsenic, copper and lead — stuff you don’t want leeching out of landfills or incinerated in garbage burners.