Recycling old smartphones is not only good for the environment – it is a potentially lucrative business for e-waste companies in China

Like many Chinese millennials, 24-year-old Lin Chenru likes to upgrade his mobile phone every couple of years – just don’t ask him where his old devices are.

“I think they’re still in my room, but I don’t know exactly where,” Lin said. “I don’t throw away my old phones when I get a new one but as time goes by, I don’t pay much attention to it.”

The reason Lin, and most consumers, hang on to retired phones is usually because there is still data stored on the old handset. “I keep them in case there is still something useful [stored] inside,” he said.

Lin is not alone in keeping retired smartphones in a forgotten corner. Research by Greenpeace East Asia, an environment-focused non-government organisation, estimated that China’s smartphone recycling rate is below 2 per cent – meaning only two out of 100 old phones are properly recycled instead of being thrown away or left in the bottom of a drawer to gather dust.

As more Chinese consumers adopt new and better devices every year, the result is a huge build up of so-called electronic garbage in old handsets that could be extracted for professional recycling, including metals such as copper and gold.

China was once a dumping ground for the world’s discarded electronic products, with the city of Guiyu in Guangdong province known for its thousands of small workshops that broke down old computers and electronics to extract materials for recycling.