UK phone mountain "worth a billion quid"

ACCORDING TO NEW research by phone merchant T-Mobile, us Brits here in Blighty have a stockpile of unused mobile phones hidden away in our homes that totals £1.1 billion.

Altogether, of the 37 million mobile phone users in the UK, we've got an average of 1.39 old handsets just laying around doing nothing. That means there's a staggering 52.3 million mobiles out of action.

T-Mobile is urging users to collect their old handsets and recycle 'em, which the company says could save on landfill waste as well as generating millions of pounds for charities, individuals, or possibly T-Mobile.

T-Mobile's got a recycling scheme going, you see: under the program, anyone with an old phone is free to trot down to their local T-Mobile shop and pick up a recycling bag. Which you can fill with phones. All new phone boxes are going to come with a free recycling bag, too. Once returned T-Mobile will give a customer or a charity of their choice up to £80, making now a perfect time to become involved in petty theft.

A PR chap told us that with the £1.1 billion that all the phones together are worth, we could collectively pay nearly 39,000 nurses, plant over 3.4 billion trees in a developing nation or buy the entire Chelsea football squad nearly four times over.

Or we could buy some new tanks and bombs and stuff. µ