What's in yer drawers?

With a bit of luck the answer isn’t a mobile phone since, having succumbed to the flash gadgetry of the latest music-playing-media-streaming-film-making-photo-taking-GPS- locating-file-sharing-life-organising-multichannel-communicating device, you will have recycled your old handset to a sustainable organisation that sends it for reuse in developing markets.

But what happens next?

On the plus side, mobile phones allow developing countries to leapfrog fixed-line technologies, avoiding the costly infrastructure they require. The supply of your affordable, reliable, refurbished handset facilitates this growth and helps deliver the huge social benefits that flow from connectivity and access to information.

The downside is that, in many developing countries, the explosion in consumption of electronic goods (like mobile phones or computers) has not been matched by growth in the management infrastructure needed to deal with these new materials when they eventually become waste. In the worst cases this has led to serious environmental contamination from unregulated dumping of toxic components, and damaged human health from informal backyard processing of precious metals.

Forum and Vodafone have explored these issues in some detail over the last few years, with a particular emphasis on Kenya. In common with much of East Africa, the strong reuse and recycling culture in Kenya has helped fulfil the growing demands of new mobile users by ensuring that each handset is used by multiple users (passed on to friends or family members when the previous user has finished with it).

As a result, there is not yet a problem with large volumes of mobile phone electronic waste (e-waste) but this situation is unlikely to last . As the market becomes more saturated and sophisticated, and as technological developments lead to ever-cheaper new handsets, it ' s probable that they will be replaced more often, and the demand for second- (or third-) hand phones will fall. In effect, Kenyan consumption patterns could begin to look more and more like our own.

Knowing this, we therefore have a huge opportunity to instigate collection and recycling schemes now that effectively prevent mobile phone electronic waste becoming a problem in the future. Exploring how such a scheme could work has been the primary focus of some of our recent work with Vodafone, and some of our findings are presented in a brief document being published in support of Vodafone’s latest dialogue paper on the same subject.

The good news is that we know what the scale of the problem is and that there is individual, business and political will to do something about it. The great news is that getting a scheme sorted in Kenya could show us how to apply similar proactive solutions in many other developing markets. But maybe the best news of all is that such collection and recycling schemes should be financially sustainable as well by being able to pay for themselves.

In summary - everyone’s a winner.

Download the report here.