Hold the phone - or it will pollute the planet

An international convention in Geneva will try to tackle the latest toxic waste crisis - mobile phones.

The phones - a billion are in use around the world - are packed with chemicals and metals that can endanger people and the environment once they are thrown away.

Developing countries complain they are being dumped on them under the guise of providing technology to the poor, and that phones are contaminating whole communities.

Next week, 160 Governments will meet in Geneva under the auspices of the Basel Convention, a United Nations treaty regulating the movement of toxic waste.

New Zealand has been a party to the convention since its inception in 1994.

In New Zealand, about 2.8 million people have mobile phones and update them about once every 18 months to two years.

Main operators Telecom and Vodafone run recycling schemes, collecting old phones in bins at shops.

Telecom keeps some old phones as temporary replacements for customers while their phones are being repaired.

Nokia and Telecom send old phones to the Citrijaya recycling plant in Singapore, where they are crushed and processed for recycling.

Telecom has said the programme is non-profit and the main objective is to ensure that old mobile phone equipment does not end up in landfills, potentially causing environmental damage.

Tests by the US and the Californian environmental protection agencies have established that they should be classified as toxic waste.

The cadmium in a single battery from an old phone could seriously contaminate 600,000 litres of water, enough to fill a third of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Cadmium is being phased out of new batteries, but many other poisonous materials remain.

Lead - which affects the immune, endocrine and central nervous systems, and causes serious damage to children's brains - is used to solder components to the printed wiring boards.

Brominated flame retardants, used in wiring boards and plastic cases, have been associated with cancer, liver damage and problems with the neurological, immune and endocrine systems.

Beryllium, which can cause serious lung damage, is used in contacts and springs and highly toxic dioxins can be emitted if the phones are incinerated in waste plants.

The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association runs a voluntary, industry-funded recycling programme in which phones and batteries are melted for use in building materials.

In Britain, a partnership between the Government, network operators and major retailers, called Fonebak, has collected and recycled more than 3.5 million phones in two years - about 10 per cent of those discarded. They are recycled in Romania.

Nickel is recovered from batteries for use in saucepans, irons and new batteries. Small amounts of platinum, gold, silver and copper are recovered for jewellery and pipes. The plastic is sent to Sweden, where it is burned to provide central heating for a village.

About 105 million handsets are discarded in Europe each year, enough - if placed end to end - to stretch from London to a point 240km beyond Perth. Even more - 130 million - are thrown out annually in the United States.

Many phones at the end of their lives are exported to countries such as India, Pakistan and China, where they are broken up for recycling in rudimentary conditions, threatening workers' health and communities.

Colombia, Nigeria, Brazil, Botswana, Uganda, Namibia and Kenya all voiced alarm at the impact of discarded phones on their countries at a previous Basel Convention meeting.

The convention is co-operating closely with the United Nations Environment Programme and mobile phone manufacturers to tackle the crisis. It is working on new phones with safer components, collecting discarded phones and recycling and disposing of them safely.

Critics hope this week's meeting will impose legal controls on the trade in old phones.

- INDEPENDENT/Additional reporting: Claire Trevett