Why unlocking cell phones is a green issue

Is it archaic to recite; "reduce, reuse, recycle"

Why unlocking cell phones is a green issue : TreeHugger:

...while cell phone unlocking is absolutely an issue of consumer and digital rights, something important has been ignored in this conversation: unlocking also a green issue. 426,000 cell phones are decommissioned every single day in the United States; many of them will end up banished to junk drawers and rotting in landfills. One billion cell phones are sitting idle in drawers and closets, losing value while they are waiting to be put back into service.
Swapping old phones is a common practice; just this week my brother borrowed an old phone from me after his failed. The catch? Swapping only works if you both use the same carrier—an artificial limitation that has created a huge barrier to a sharing economy. Re-legalizing unlocking will keep more devices in service and out of the national waste stream.
Cell phones and the environment
Wireless technology is a big business in the United States. There are more wireless devices in the US than there are people. As of late 2012, Apple had sold more than 85 million iPhones and 34 million iPads. To date, Samsung has produced 800 million mobile phones. Those numbers grow every single day—and that has environmental consequences.
Electronics manufacturing isn’t a clean industry. A single cell phone houses within it over half of the elements on the period table—many of which can’t be recovered in recycling.

Read the entire article at TreeHugger: