T-Mobile, international purveyors of cell phones and overpriced WiFi hotspots, reports that phone tech worth £1.1bn is stashed away in Britain's drawers, closets and cupboards. Market penetration in the U.K. is at about 239 percent — 1 live handset plus an average of 1.39 unused ones — making the entire country awash with cellular technology.
T-Mobile's angle is that it wants you to give your phones to it for recycling (post-consumer recycling is the U.K.'s current wave-a-magic-wand solution to environmental problems caused by massive corporations), though it will at least shuffle some cash to a charity of your choice when you do so.
Operating on the standard UK-US convertion rate (mutiply it by 5: works for everything from head count to military spending!), that suggests we might have a staggering $10bn worth of Startacs and other obsolescent crap floating around.
UK phone mountain "worth a billion quid" [The Inquirer]
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