Japanese people go through cell phone handsets like a box of tissues—the keypads get all beat up from the continuous text messaging, manufacturers keep coming out with higher camera resolutions, and the pearly clamshell is so last season. So now, Pink Tentacle reports, NTT DoCoMO has teamed up with convenience store chain am/pm to provide anti-theft cell phone recycling bins in shops all over the country. This recycling system has been available at DoCoMo stores for a couple years now, amounting to over 40 tons of copper and 300 pounds of gold recycled in 2005. Pretty impressive.
Also new on the recycling front is a denture recycling station at the municipal government HQ in Chiba. Yeah, I know, kinda gross, right? But dentures actually have a significant amount of gold and silver embedded in them, which can be pawned for money to donate to starving children all over the world. The Japan Denture Recycling Association is teaming up with UNICEF to do precisely that.
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