Mobile phones are one of the biggest technological advances made in recent years. Fifteen years ago very few people owned a mobile as they were big, expensive to buy and calls cost a fortune.
Today it would be surprising if anyone reading this didn’t own at least one and around 75% of people in Ireland own and regularly use a mobile phone. This means that there are roughly 3,133,000 mobiles in use in Ireland.
Statistics for the UK are more staggering where many people, just like Ireland, have more than one mobile or have old phones lying around at home. There are an estimated 90 million unwanted phones in the UK alone many of these are as a result of the 15million phones that are upgraded there every year.
Some person worked out that if these phones were laid end to end they would stretch from John O’Groats to Land’s End…..a distance of 1,300km or from Wexford to Dublin and back again more than four times.
This mobile mountain weights around 12,000 tonnes and it is estimated that only 5% of old mobile phones are currently recycled.
