Don't throw away your old phones. You are actually throwing away real gold! Smartphones have many kinds of useful metals. People can recycle them to make new electronics.
But many people may not know this. In Australia alone there are more than 25 million unused mobile phones lying around, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. The gold in these phones can add up to a value of more than $80 million. There are about 2 billion smartphone users around the world, who change their phone once every 11 months on average. So in China, eighty million old phones come along every year.
However, it's not easy to get the useful things out of the phones. Smartphones have not only useful things but also harmful materials. Guiyu, a small town in Shantou, Guangdong, is one of the world's biggest dumping grounds for electronic waste, Reuters reported. Many recycling centers in Guiyu simply break the old electronics by hand and don't think about the pollution it causes. It's reported that 81 percent of children in Guiyu are harmed by lead poisoning(铅中毒).
Veena Sahajwalla, a professor at Australia's University of New South Wales, has made a mini factory. It makes smartphone recycling cleaner and easier. The mini factory is very small and easy to move around. It breaks the phones and automatically(自动地)removes the phone's useful things. That way, humans do not get poisoned.
Well, have you ever wondered what happens to the old phone after it's no longer yours? A part of your old smartphone could soon be proudly worn around the neck of one of the world's top athletes. Organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics say that medals for the event will be made from recycled phones. They will also be made out of people's thoughts for avoiding waste. They think there is an important message in this for the future.
