If Santa brought you a new cellphone for Christmas, a local school would like to take away your old one.
Bertha Kennedy Community School has been collecting used cellphones for about six years as part of a national program that pays the school $1 for every phone collected. The school uses the money for various environmental initiatives.
Cellphone technology changes so quickly that the items have basically become a disposable product, but they contain many materials that make them bad news for the garbage heap. These toxic contents include arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel and zinc, which have been associated with cancer and neurological disorders, according to Pitch-In Canada’s website.
“If we just put them in our garbage they end up in the landfill, leaching into the environment,” said Dolores Andressen, a Bertha Kennedy teacher and co-ordinator of the school’s cellphone collection program, a partnership with Pitch-In Canada.
The national non-profit organization refurbishes workable phones for distribution to people in need or takes apart and disposes of phones that are beyond repair. Whenever the school accumulates 50 phones, Pitch-In Canada pays for a courier to ship them to Ontario. The school collects about 100 phones a year, Andressen said.
Pitch-In Canada has more than 800 participants across the country and collects thousands of phones each year. But this is minimal compared to the millions of cellphones that are estimated to be improperly discarded annually, said program manager Misha Cook.
“We need people to know that cellular phones need to be disposed of properly and that this can be done easily, locally and often benefit a good cause,” Cook said.
Bertha Kennedy collects used cellphones on an ongoing basis throughout the school year. Phones can be dropped off at the office whenever the building is open, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays.
Following the Christmas break, the school will re-open on Jan. 3. It’s located at 175 Larose Dr.
