Area students recycle cell phones to help wild great apes

Des Moines, Iowa – December 17, 2008 – Students at several central Iowa school districts and Des Moines Area Community College are collecting used cellular phones and accessories to help Great Ape Trust of Iowa-supported conservation programs for endangered wild great apes in Africa and Indonesia.

“We only have the one world, and we want it preserved as much as possible,” said Cody Duncan, a biology major from Urbandale and vice president of DMACC’s Beta Epsilon Eta chapter of Phi Theta Kappa. The DMACC chapter of the international honors fraternity is working with Great Ape Trust to keep cell phones out of landfills.

Students in the Southeast Polk, Perry and Van Meter school districts also have recently signed on as partners in Great Ape Trust’s cell phone recycling program, which since 2005 has raised about $1,900 for in-situ conservation. Comparatively, that’s a small amount of money in the United States, but in Rwanda, it’s enough to equip 633 homes with energy-efficient stoves and reduce the dependence of the families living in them on the forest, home to critically endangered mountain gorillas and endangered chimpanzees. Or, $1,900 would pay a half-year’s salary and benefits for a surrogate human mother for a baby ape orphaned by the bushmeat trade, habitat destruction and other natural and manmade threats to the survival of great apes.

Van Meter middle school and high school art teacher Rebecca Comer said the students in the advisory group she oversees began researching options for a local recycling program for old cell phones – standard equipment for students as well as adults – that pose potential environmental hazards when disposed in the local landfill. As they learned about Great Ape Trust’s program, they found a way to make a global impact as well. Other cell phone recycling programs carry shipping costs for the items collected, but Great Ape Trust assumes that responsibility, making it a project Comer’s small group of 10 students could manage efficiently.

Student advisory groups were implemented last year at Van Meter as a way to instill in students a commitment to community service. The groups meet twice a month and take on a variety of projects from coat drives to food drives to the cell phone recycling program spearheaded by Comer’s group.

Andy Antilla, a senior orangutan caretaker at Great Ape Trust who oversees the cell phone-recycling program, has seen the program grow from a handful of participating businesses to include a growing number of schools as students look for ways to adopt more environmentally responsible habits.

“People are trying to find a program they like and believe in, and our program has grown as they find out about it,” Antilla said. “Everyone has a junk drawer at home with two or three cell phones, and kids are changing theirs out very frequently.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that fewer than 20 percent of cell phones in the United States are recycled and as many as 130 million phones are buried in landfills each year. Recycling 100 million of them would save enough energy to power nearly 200,000 U.S. homes for a year, according to the EPA, and if those phones were re-used as well, enough energy would be saved to power more than 370,000 U.S. homes a year.

Recycling cell phones not only conserves quickly disappearing landfill space – 130 million cell phones equal about 65,000 tons of electronic garbage – but it also reduces the amount of toxic metals that can pollute the environment and threaten human health. Responsible recycling also potentially decreases the need for new mining for metals like columbite tantalite, or coltan, which is sometimes called “the new blood diamond” because it often finances guerilla in unstable areas like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The DRC, the only place in the world where bonobos are found and providing habitat for one of the last remaining populations of the critically endangered Eastern Lowland gorilla, one of the world’s creatures, has up to 80 percent of the world’s coltan resources. When refined, coltan becomes metallic tantalum, which has unique properties for storing an electrical charge and is used in many modern electronic devices, including cell phones, laptop computers, pagers and PDAs. Coltan mining is one of the factors that has further decimated

Great Ape Trust operates its cell phone recycling program through Eco-Cell, a non-profit group partnering with conservation organizations to keep cell phones out of landfills and to help organizations such as The Trust raise money for their conservation projects. Great Ape Trust receives rates ranging from 45 cents to $15 per phone.

Those interested in joining the recycling effort and receiving collection boxes to place in their schools, businesses and other venues should inquire by e-mail at info@GreatApeTrust.org. The Trust accepts all cell phones, regardless of age or condition, as well as cell phone batteries and other accessories.