Britons 'sitting on mobile phone mountain'
By myfinances.co.uk staff
Britons are sitting on a mobile phone mountain, with an estimated 85 million old handsets lying around the nation's homes.
Research conducted by ICM for Consumer Focus found that 68% of mobile owners have at least one phone they no longer use, while 11% claim to have five or more discarded handsets in their home.
Furthermore, one in ten said that when they do dispose of an old phone, they simply throw it in the bin.
The organisation urged people instead to donate their unwanted handsets to charity, give them to family and friends or recycle them using a second-hand scheme.
It added that these initiatives pay an average of £25 for a used phone, with some units fetching up to £300.
Hannah Bullivant, the watchdog's mobile phone expert, said: "These are sophisticated bits of kit that can still be used or recycled. By throwing phones away, we're wasting huge amounts of money and adding unnecessarily to our landfill mountains."
Consumer Focus is a statutory body that campaigns for fair deals for shoppers in England, Wales and Scotland. It also covers postal services in Northern Ireland.
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