Recycling: This Old Gadget.(refurbished cell phones)

Byline: Silvia Spring

When you bought that fancy cell phone with the two-megapixel camera, you probably didn't think twice about throwing your old cameraless model in your sock drawer. If so, you have lots of company. Britons trade in 15 million phones each year. The average mobile-phone user in the United States buys a new handset every 18 months. In Europe, it's every 15 months, and in Japan just nine. This rapid turnover is a big reason why electronic waste, which barely existed 20 years ago, is now the fastest growing type of manufactured garbage--50 million tons gets dumped in landfills every year, according to the United Nations Environmental Program.

A growing number of entrepreneurs are catching on to the value inherent in this electronic detritus. They're collecting it, refurbishing it and reselling it--to the tune of several billion dollars a year, says World Data Products, a firm that restores computer equipment. Market research firm Gartner Group says the 55 million used PCs sold worldwide in 2004 will double by 2009. The selling point: gadgets are usually discarded before their useful lives are over. Although mobile phones are typically designed to last five years, they get tossed in ...