3 Economics of cell phone reuse and recycling
Some reuse and recycling activities are voluntary and environmentally motivated, yet most are driven either by market economics or legislation. Apart from the previously mentioned European WEEE directive and California’s AB2901, there is currently little legislation mandating cell phone reuse or recycling. Even the WEEE directive has fairly modest collection targets (4 kg of WEEE per head per year) of any type of e-waste, whereas AB2901 only mandates a collection infrastructure for cell phones and has neither collection nor reuse or recycling targets. So, in the absence of strong legislation, profitability is currently the main driver of the collection and reprocessing of retired handsets. Assessing the economics of cell phone reuse and recycling is thus critical in order to understand current types and levels of end-of-use management activities. The main economic costs of cell phone end-of-use management are reverse logistics and reprocessing, which is either recycling or some level of refurbishment. The two main sources of revenues are the sale of refurbished handsets for reuse and the sale of the recovered metals on the commodity markets. The existence of both cell phone reuse and recycling show that there are viable business models around both activities. In the following three sections, we identify those business models, quantify their profitability, and discuss the relationship between reuse and recycling.