Hundreds of millions of idle phones have a regular recovery rate of less than 2%. Where did your old mobile phone go？
Xinhua News Agency, Guangzhou, November 21st Question: The regular recovery rate is less than 2%, and some of them are resold with old ones — — Where did your old mobile phone go?
Xinhua News Agency "Xinhua Viewpoint" reporters Ma Xiaocheng and Sun Fei
"These are old mobile phones that my family and I have eliminated in recent years." Zhang Li, who lives in Futian District, Shenzhen, pointed to nearly ten old mobile phones of different brands and models at home.
A survey by Xinhua Viewpoint reporter found that at present, there are hundreds of millions of idle mobile phones in China, and the formal recovery rate is less than 2%. Where is the "home" of the old mobile phone?
There are hundreds of millions of idle mobile phones in stock, and a waste battery of a mobile phone can pollute 3200 barrels of standard bottled water.
Zhang Li is a post-80s generation who pursues fashion. "Now the mobile phone is upgrading too fast. I have to change a new mobile phone in an average year or so." She said that the disposal of old mobile phones is a difficult problem. "Old mobile phones store a lot of personal information and dare not throw it away at will."
According to data released by China Information and Communication Research Institute, in 2016, China’s domestic mobile phone market shipped 560 million units, an increase of 8% year-on-year. Xiong Zhou, a partner in recycling treasure who is engaged in mobile phone recycling business, estimates that China produces at least 400 million idle mobile phones every year, and the stock of idle mobile phones is about 1 billion. Zheng Fujiang, president of Ai Recycling, said that there is no authoritative statistics on the data of idle mobile phones in the industry at present, but it is at least hundreds of millions.
"How to effectively deal with the huge amount of used mobile phones needs urgent attention." Xiong Zhou said.
Official website, a mobile phone trade-in, shows that once the mobile phone enters the scrap recycling link, the treatment of heavy metals such as gold, mercury, lead and cadmium is very difficult to control. The cadmium contained in a battery can pollute 60,000 liters of water, which is equivalent to 3,200 barrels of standard bottled water used in daily drinking fountains.
Wen Zongguo, director of Tsinghua University Circular Economy Industry Research Center, said that mobile phones are a huge pollution source. If idle mobile phones enter the garbage system, they will generate toxic gases when burned, and the soil will be seriously polluted when buried. If it is sent to some unqualified small workshops for treatment, it will bring great harm to the body and environment of the dismantler.
The regular recovery rate is less than 2%, and many mobile phones are resold with old ones.
Many people in the industry said that the formal recovery rate of domestic mobile phones is less than 2%. Love recycling is the official partner of many mobile phone brands and JD.COM. Zheng Yujiang, president of the company, said that taking love recycling as an example, real-name registration should be carried out when collecting mobile phones to confirm that the source is legal and formal; After receiving the mobile phones, they will be classified. Those in good condition will be cleaned up, and then they will be hung on channels such as JD.COM Youpin to mark the second-hand mobile phones for sale. Those that cannot be reused will be handed over to enterprises with environmental protection qualifications for dismantling.
However, the reporter’s investigation found that there are a large number of gray trading behaviors outside the formal recycling channels.
-recycling. In Zhongguancun, Beijing, Tianhe Computer City, Guangzhou and Huaqiang North, Shenzhen, there are many shops and individuals who claim that they can recycle their mobile phones at high prices. In Huaqiang North, the reporter asked several shops with an Apple 6 mobile phone that had been used for three years. After confirming that the mobile phone was in good condition, the other party said that they could buy it, and the prices ranged from 700 yuan to 900 yuan, without any identity registration. When the reporter asked whether the mobile phone data would be cleaned up, the shopkeepers did not give a positive answer. Some shopkeepers asked, "Is your data valuable to others?"
-circulation. According to the survey, some recycled old mobile phones will re-enter the market. Feiyang Times Building, located in Huaqiang North, is one of the second-hand mobile phone distribution centers. From two o’clock in the afternoon to six o’clock, people are coming and going here. Mr. Lin Yue, who has been engaged in mobile phone recycling business for more than ten years, said that all Apple mobile phones recovered from various channels come to this market to find their next homes. Some of them are resold as second-hand mobile phones, and some people secretly do renovations, and then resell the old ones with new ones to reap huge profits.
In May last year, Mr. Deng bought an Apple mobile phone in a communication equipment store in houjie town, Dongguan. After purchasing it for more than two months, he found that the warranty period of the mobile phone was about to expire. After mediation by Dongguan Consumer Council, the merchant admitted that the mobile phone was a refurbished mobile phone. Mai Huixian, deputy director of the Dongguan Consumer Council, said that among the consumer complaints received last year, the most complaints were about mobile communication, focusing on unscrupulous merchants selling refurbished machines without telling consumers.
-disassembly. Second-hand mobile phones with no use value will eventually be dismantled into various spare parts. In the past, many mobile phones were dismantled in an irregular workshop in Guiyu Town, Shantou, Guangdong Province, which caused serious environmental pollution. In recent years, the dismantling here has to be completed in the circular industrial park and supervised.
A person in charge of a company responsible for dismantling mobile phones told reporters that their company can handle 20,000 mobile phones a day. After three or four processes, a scrapped mobile phone will be disassembled into plastic, stainless steel, camera, motherboard and other small accessories, and then sold to specialized manufacturers for processing. However, due to the high cost of dismantling to meet environmental standards, many small workshops are illegally engaged in dismantling.
Strictly crack down on illegal renovation and sale, and introduce policies to encourage recycling.
In the eyes of the industry, there are still many difficulties in recycling used mobile phones. On the one hand, it is necessary to create a good market order so that mobile phones that can be reused can be reused. For those that cannot be recycled, we should increase support for formal dismantling enterprises and reduce the industrial space for illegal dismantling.
Ge Jian, a 360 mobile guardian security expert, suggested that citizens’ information security should be protected through legislation to avoid worries of consumers. Zheng Yujiang suggested that public security and other relevant departments should intensify their efforts to crack down on the gray recycling industry chain, especially to crack down on illegal renovation and sale, illegal stealing of user privacy from mobile phones and illegal random disassembly.
Many people in the industry said that in developed countries, it is customary for mobile phones to be produced, recycled and disposed of. Mobile phones account for a large proportion of sales through operators and other channels. When consumers buy new machines, many old mobile phones are recycled at the same time. In our country, the behavior of enterprises recycling consumers’ mobile phones has not yet formed.
Xiong Zhou said that the new edition of the Catalogue for Disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Products in 2016 included mobile phones, which means that mobile phone recycling will be included in the management scope supported by national policies and funds, but the specific rules have not yet been issued. He suggested that the subsidy rules for dismantling and processing of used mobile phones should be issued as soon as possible.