Uconsumption: Tentative project proposal regarding old cellphones

Recently I had to buy a new cell phone. I don’t mean that I wanted a new one with cooler features, I mean the “0” button on my old one stopped working, and it turns out you pretty much need all ten digits to use a phone, even if you’re a minimal cell phone user, as I am.

This happened to coincide with a fresh round of attention to the much-discussed problem of e-waste. (See this earlier post.) I assumed that Sprint would simply take my old phone and get rid of it for me appropriately. They didn’t. But when I got home, I noticed that they’d given me a special envelope, the one pictured here. So I guess I just pop it in there and put it in the mail and it gets taken care of for me.

Seems better to just take it from me at the store. But …

… assuming that this is on the up-and-up — and the disposal really is responsible — this envelope approach is kind of interesting. If it’s true, as this article mentioned, that there are hundreds of millions of cell phones just sitting in desk drawers, maybe somebody should come up with a way to distribute envelopes like these – or really even just distribute the mailing address. (I’ve obscured the address here because I guess there might be some kind of parameters about what phones they accept, and I don’t want the upshot of this post to be Sprint coming after me if a bunch of other providers’ phones start showing up, or whatever.)

I see that on the site of Recellular, the famous wireless recycling company, they list “use a pre-paid envelope” as a way to send them an old phone, noting that such envelopes are “available from most wireless retailers or packaged with your new cell phone.” (Does that mean all new cell phones come with an envelope? I don’t know.) I’m not sure if there’s some reason why they wouldn’t just publicize the address, for those who have an old cell phone sitting around and might be willing to spring for postage if it meant they didn’t have to drive somewhere to drop their old phone off or pick up a special envelope.

So it all got me thinking: Wouldn’t spreading the address or addresses to send your old cell phone to be a pretty easy online word-of-mouth (unconsumption) project for somebody? I mean spread them in a way that was fun and caught on and got people to take action? Good project for an agency looking to do something good? Clever student project that sparked thousands to properly unconsumed their outdated mobiles?

Is this already happening? If it is, could it be done better?

Or am I missing something obvious? About why it wouldn’t work?