The Phone
Drawer

“If you haven’t used it in the past five years, you’ll probably never use it again.” With the Golden Rule of Tidy Houses in mind, I loaded up my car with stuff I no longer needed. Half-used cans of paint, some kind of floor polish left in the shed by the former owner, a dismantled rickety cupboard, a keyboard with three jammed keys that hadn’t been tapped since my student days. Whoever designed the Recycle Centre deserves a medal. On arrival and departure, a scale hidden in the tarmac weighed my car to determine how much stuff I’d brought. Having everyone drive up a ramp first – another stroke of genius! Gravity certainly is a welcome ally when it’s time to dispose of large quantities of wood, construction waste and other heavy objects. Chemical waste and electronics were given extra TLC, with a staff member diligently sorting waste to make sure it ended up in the right bins. I returned home as the triumphant Recycling King of Amsterdam-North, until I turned my mind to all the stuff I’d decided not to jettison. For the umpteenth time. The good old phone drawer. And I’m not the only one. A few years ago, a poll by Statistics Netherlands revealed that more than 50% of Dutch people hold onto their old mobile phones. A missed opportunity, because phones are home to a veritable treasure trove of usable materials such as gold, silver, copper and platinum. What’s stopping so many of us from recycling our former phones? Their modest size is probably part of the equation: while it takes but a week for my paper bin to fill up and become an eyesore in the kitchen, the phone drawer stays blissfully out of sight unless you make the mistake of opening it. But there’s another factor, at least there is for me: all those old mobile phones are still packed to the brim with data, from phone numbers to phones to messages. While I know that all the data can also be found floating around in my Cloud somewhere, those mobile phones feel like physical backups, in case the Cloud suddenly goes up in smoke one day. All you’ll need is an antiquated charger to save those cherished memories. I open the drawer. I look at the ghosts of mobile phones past. If I do decide to recycle them, I realise, I’ll have to charge and start each one of them to erase the data they harbour. Feeling slightly embarrassed, I close the drawer and promise myself: “Next time, definitely next time.”