Mobile phones recycled as palm-sized tellies

IN TOKYO'S fashionable Akihabara district, palm-size tellies are all the rage. You can pick one up for just under 10,000 yen (that’s £47.37) which is very reasonable. (But don’t those Japanese work in funny multiples?)

How on earth do they manage this? By being green. Small and mid-size manufacturers are knocking out these cheap sets because they’re able to recycle the LCDs (liquid crystal displays) from mobile phones.

At the Kanagawa Prefecture disassembly plant in Fujisawa, workers take the LCDs out of used mobile phones and check their functions. Currently, 60,000 LCDs are recycled into portable TVs per year.

They’ve been doing this since 2005, which begs the question, why don’t we do the same in the UK?

For anyone interested in emulating them, here’s how the Japanese did it. The Connect Repro factory started the recycling business in late 2005, when its president, Kazumasa Tanaka was shocked at the waste of high-definition LCDs being binned after only two years of use. Which is the average time mobiles last. The firm gets its used handsets from the recycling firms. In Japan, mobile phone companies commission recycling companies to collect old handsets. A new 2.4-inch LCD costs about 1,200 yen (£5.68) while a recycled one sells for less than half that.

The recycled LCDs are used in other devices as well. Plaza Create, a major photo printing service chain, rents out digital cameras that use recycled mobile phone LCDs for 1,000 yen (£4.73! That can’t be right, surely!)

Purchasers then return the cameras to a Plaza Create shop, after taking their pictures, and can have them developed for 37 yen per photo (18 pence. 18 pence!!). After recharging their batteries, the company put the returned camera back up for rent.

Kazumasa Tanaka, president of Connect Repro, confessed he’s not even sure if he can keep up with demand!

In Britain, old mobiles are generally used for landfill, or for filling up junk drawers in the kitchen.

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