Are you a mobile phone hoarder? Is your first iPhone lurking in a shoebox underneath your bed, or collecting dust on a shelf in the storeroom? You're not alone.
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MobileMuster, a non-profit program run by Australia's mobile phone industry, is encouraging hoarders to recycle their smashed, cracked and abandoned mobiles as part of a campaign leading up to World Environment Day. They even built an Opera House out of old mobile phones, in conjunction with UTS, to inspire you.
Research commissioned through Ipsos found there are 22.5 million disused mobile phones lying around Australian homes that could be recycled. Almost 7.5 million are in NSW.
Recycling those 7.5 million phones would have the equivalent environmental impact of planting 19,000 trees or saving 3121 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, according to MobileMuster.
But making people aware of those benefits – and motivating them to part with their old phones – has proven a challenge.
Mobile phones occupy a strange place on the spectrum between major purchase and disposable product. They are small and increasingly lightweight, belying their expense. The new iPhone 6 Plus starts at $1149 in Australia – though contracts can make phones easier to pay off over a period of time.
So it's little surprise that, although we're inclined to replace our hardware regularly, some of us have difficulty parting with our discarded former friends. This correspondent has at least two old iPhones, both with smashed screens, stashed in a drawer somewhere for no discernable reason.
Emma Heath, from Manly, is another of the hoarders. She's holding on to three old mobile phones, among them an old Nokia which brings back a flood of memories about what she was up to 10 years ago.
"I definitely get sentimental and place an emotional value on things," she says. "I think it comes back to the memories of what you were doing at the time."
But who are the other hoarders? MobileMuster identified the seven types of eccentrics likely to have phones hidden under the mattress.
The gift-giver
Spurred on by the best of intentions, this individual aspires to give her beloved old phone a new life with someone less telecommunicationally fortunate. Children, family friends, older relatives still graduating from their Nokia 3301 – all are ideal candidates for the hand-me-down smartphone.
As a recipient, it's a gift you simply can't begrudge. After all, even if the battery has decayed and there are bits chipped off the side, it's still a smartphone and the laws of politeness compel you to be grateful.
The gold-digger
This person has an acute memory of the insanely high amount they paid for the product in the first place, but precious little understanding of the laws of depreciation. Still hoping their deceased iPhone 2 has retained some of its value, they will allow it to sit aimlessly in a cupboard for years, subconsciously aware that actually trying to flog it would be fruitless.
Liable to become a gift-giver as a means of last resort, hoping to extract an emotional return-on-investment in lieu of a monetary one.
The 'maybe later'
Environmentally conscious but not to the point of action, this Good Samaritan stockpiles old phones with the intent of one day recycling them. Sadly, a sojourn to the local council's elusive e-waste collection never eventuates.
About 90 per cent of materials used in mobile phones can be reused, according to MobileMuster. But that requires actually getting them out of the cupboard and into recycling, which is easier said than done when there's no incentive.
The security conscious
Our phones document our lives – the good, the bad, the ugly and the embarrassing. For some, the fear of personal texts, photographs and videos somehow escaping the trash compactor and getting into the wrong hands is enough to make them hold on to the device forever.
It can be an even greater psychological barrier to recycling a phone, which conjures thoughts of somebody else picking it up, turning it on and having access to your entire past. But MobileMuster says the phones' components are destroyed in the recycling process, meaning your salacious secrets are safe with you.
The sentimentalist
Separated from a hoarder by only the wafer-thin-mintiest of margins, the sentimentalist has a genuine emotional attachment to the memories ensconced in that battered old hunk of metal we call a phone (they probably gave it a name, like "Judy").
It doesn't really matter that all those photos of San Francisco are now on Facebook anyway – the sentimentalist cannot quite bring themselves to part with the magic machine that accompanied them on that unforgettable west coast road trip. Plus, it was a gift from their first serious boyfriend: how could anyone just throw that away?
The technophile
These people go through new releases like tea bags – drained and deserted before the rest of us have opened the packaging. For the technophile, there's a certain joy in seeing the device progress from generation to generation.
There is also the sheer senselessness of throwing something out after barely half an hour. Better to keep it for posterity than lose it to history.
The doomsday-er
While it might seem reasonable to keep an old-but-usable phone in case of a rainy day, this category of handset hoarder harbours genuine fear of a doomsday scenario.
MobileMuster's research indicated that one in 10 Australians kept their old mobile because of the possibility of an "end of world" event, such as an alien invasion, which could render current lines of communication inoperative.
How exactly the older phones would function without control towers or Wi-Fi is not clear, unless the extra-terrestrial intruders looked kindly upon rotary dials.
Whatever the reason, stockpiling old mobile phones is rarely a productive pursuit. Better to come clean and recycle them – and their outdated accessories.
World Environment Day is on Friday, June 5.
