Worldwide sales of mobile phones are expected to exceed one billion by the year 2009. In 2006, 143 million mobile phones were sold in the United States alone, and a 2007 study showed that American consumers use their phones for only an average of 17.5 months before replacing them. Despite the global proliferation of phones, only 5% of phones are ever recycled, thus leading to a massive potential problem of e-waste.

There is an increasingly common trend of acquiring technologies, most notably consumer electronics, with the expectation that they will replaced or disposed of before they cease to be functionally viable. We refer to this trend the disposable technology paradigm, and it is visible in increasingly ubiquitous devices such as laptops and portable mp3 players, that are typically replaced within a few years, and whose usage lifetime is often much shorter than their functional lifetime…