A Win-Win Situation
Phone Recycling to Benefit U.S. Troops

If you no longer have use for an old cell phone, Blair’s sustainability initiative committee hopes you will recycle it rather than simply discard it. While there are numerous ways to accomplish this task, the Timken Library staff offers an easy option that benefits U.S. troops at the same time. By participating in Cell Phones for Soldiers, you can provide a soldier with “talk time.” Simply go to the library and ask for one of the envelopes available for this purpose, pop in your phone and mail it off, with no postage required.

According to the organization’s Web site, Cell Phones for Soldiers hopes to turn old cell phones into more than 12 million minutes of prepaid calling cards for U.S. troops stationed overseas this year. By year’s end, the group expects to have collected 15,000 cell phones each month through a network of more than 3,000 collection sites across the country. The phones are sent to ReCellular, which pays Cell Phones for Soldiers for each donated phone – enough to provide an hour of talk time to soldiers abroad.

“Americans will replace an estimated 130 million cell phones this year,” says Mike Newman, vice president of ReCellular, “with the majority of phones either discarded or stuffed in a drawer. Most people don’t realize that the small sacrifice of donating their unwanted phones can have a tremendous benefit for a worthy cause like Cell Phones for Soldiers.”

The group was founded by teenagers Robbie and Brittany Bergquist from Norwell, Mass., with $21 of their own money. Since then, the registered 501c3 non-profit organization has raised almost $1 million in donations and distributed more than 400,000 prepaid calling cards to soldiers serving overseas.

Posted 9/26/08

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