The New York Times Magazine has a great article on handset recycling in its latest issue, looking at some of the different things that can happen to handsets after their owner moves on. It takes a look inside a metals reclamation plant that takes precious metals out of old electronics, and also looks at the reseller trade that churns handsets over around the world.

That’s the good part. But there’s plenty of bad news as well. The reclamation company estimates that it and its competitors only took in 1 percent of all the phones that were tossed out in 2006; another recycling company estimates that just 10 percent of phones sold in the US ever get recycled.

Then, of course, there’s the nasty parts of the electronics recycling world — the emissions given off by the process of reclaiming metals from devices (though the plant cited in the NYT story is a state-of-the-art facility that minimizes these), and the horrible conditions endured by people who work as recyclers in some parts of the world. Then, of course, there’s that old industry bugbear, coltan — the ore that provides the tantalum used in capacitors. Just like “conflict diamonds”, control of the coltan trade has been blamed for fueling civil war in Africa. And, of course, tantalum can’t be reclaimed from old handsets and recycled.

It’s really depressing that so few handsets in the US are recycled, especially when it’s so easy to do so. Essentially every operator here runs recycling programs, and plenty of other easy outlets exist. Hopefully, though, unrecycled handsets are at least living in people’s drawers or closets, rather than making their way into landfills. A big priority here should be to raise awareness of handset recycling programs, and of the damage that throwing away old handsets — and other electronics — can do.

But there’s a technological angle here, as well as a social one. It’s imperative that vendors work on finding ways to reduce the environmental impact of their products, by using fewer toxic materials, improving recycling, and finding alternatives to conflict materials like coltan. Sure, that’s far easier said than done. But some work on this front would do a lot to allay the concern that the mobile industry’s current “green” push is just lip service.