Whatever you do, don't ask me why we're not doing this yet. It seems like a ridiculously simple idea, yet somehow, the largest and most effective sorting industry has yet to get in on the recycling game.
Yes, I'm talking about the post office. Sure, they've got their problems, but you can't say that they aren't awfully good at making billions of little bits of stuff go to the right places. And, really, what is recycling (and reuse) but getting little bits of stuff to the right places. Sherwood Forlee submitted the "Just Mail It" program as a "greener gadget" at the Greener Gadgets conference, and I recently found it and was struck by the simplicity.
I told Sherwood that this would be even simpler with an embedded RFID tag, and he said that, indeed, would be a slightly better solution, if the post office was ready to accept and read them. But the idea is the same...simply have small recyclable items with high resale values dropped into the mail box for recycling. Yes, it would decrease the per-phone recycling profits (and yes, they do make a profit on phones), but it would greatly increase the number of phones recycled, and reduce the age at which devices finally find their way out of junk drawers.
It occurs to me that this could be expanded beyond cell phones as well. Though, with exploding laptop batteries, I think they might have to be excluded. But for small electronics of the kind that invariably end up sitting in junk drawers for a decade before finally hitting the landfill, this is a solution that I think is (hopefully) convenient enough for people to actually participate in.
Here on EcoGeek we've written a lot about how to recycle your old electronics. First, because it's a great idea and there are so many electronics out there not being used but with lots of useful and expensive parts. And second, because many of those parts are poisonous, so many end up in landfills that it's posing a huge environmental problem.
Recycling electronics - good. Throwing away electronics - bad. How many gadget-happy Americans live by this standard? Not many, according to a new survey commissioned by retailer 
I don't know why other companies don't do this, but 
