Spare a thought for Santa Claus in the New Year – can you even imagine the recuperation period he must be going through at the moment? I mean, there’s the whole host of occupational health and safety issues of delivering an estimated 20 million new mobile phones UK for Christmas, and that’s not to mention the bigger items dropped off via the express-sleigh home-delivery service!

If you are one of the multitude who received a new mobile phone UK in your Christmas stocking, now is also the time to spare some thought about what to do with the old one. There are a massive 90 million mobile phones tucked away in cupboards and drawers throughout the UK – which may be a relative drop in the ocean compared with other unwanted Christmas socks, jocks and ties – but it’s a figure that’s enormous enough to make people want to do something about it.

There are a lot of UK mobile phone drop-off and recycling services cropping up all over the place. A lot come with a cash-back incentive or directly benefit national and international charity – so even your unwanted mobile phone offers a great deal for you!

Here’s the million pound question: why would there be so much incentive to offer great mobile phone deals for obsolete products? Well, a lot of the time, your old mobile phone isn’t quite as obsolete as you imagine it to be. On average, a phone in the UK has a turn-over rate of 18 months, even though the handset has an approximate lifespan of eight years. This can encourage a new lease of second-hand life for your phone in UK online trade-ins or destined for regions in Eastern Europe or Africa. Plus, a lot of the inner workings of your phone are valuable to recover through recycling. Electronic components can be reused, precious and semiprecious metals can be separated and extracted, and plastics can be granulated and reformulated or provide energy through a process of incinera tion. There are also some things inside your phone which should never make their way to landfill. Batteries consist of some toxic chemicals that you just don’t want to have leaking into the soil and possibly contaminating soil and water sources.

More information can be found about these initiatives online, in newspapers or your local mobile phone retailer.