MobileMuster feeding people with your old phone

The folk at MobileMuster are at it again, turning old phones into something of value. A few months ago we reported how MobileMuster was repurposing old phones to help members of the deafblind community. Now it is running a program to provide food relief for Australians who need it through OzHarvest.

Here’s the deal: if you send it your old phone – broken or working, doesn’t matter – to MobileMuster, it will donate the cost of a meal to OzHarvest, which has been doing fine work feeding the needy. The program is running until the end of February. MobileMuster is aiming for 60,000 mobiles, which means 60,000 meals.

MobileMuster says there are twenty five million old mobile phones out in the community, and it wants to pull as many of them in for recycling as possible.

“We know four million of these old mobile handsets are broken and completely unusable which is a huge opportunity for all Aussies to clean out their junk drawers and get those broken handsets recycled,” says Spyro Kalos, Recycling Manager for MobileMuster.

So what is MobileMuster and how do you get your phone to it? Well, MobileMuster is, as it explains, “the Australian mobile phone industry’s official product stewardship program”.  Most of the major players in the Australian mobile phone industry are members of trade association which manages it. That is, Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Virgin Mobile, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, HTC, Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel and OPPO. Its goal is the recycle all brands of mobile phones, including their batteries and accessories, to avoid them ending up in landfill.

MobileMuster return satchel in the box for my old Samsung Galaxy S6

As for getting your old phone to it, MobileMuster says that you can drop the phone (and all accessories) at any retail mobile store, or use the free post satchel available at any Australia Post outlet, to send it to them.

I’d add one more. If you’ve purchased a phone – or perhaps got one for Christmas – and still have the box, check. It may well have a green and white MobileMuster satchel inside for your old phone