The sales director of a large Japanese company thought he was doing a good deed when he donated his BlackBerry for recycling. But later a group of British and Australian researchers discovered the device and found it still contained sensitive data, including bank account numbers, a business plan for his organization, and the identity of his main customers.

Indeed, a September 2008 survey of 160 mobiles by the researchers - a team from British Telecom (BT), Wales' University of Glamorgan, and Australia's Edith Cowan University - found that one in five mobile communications devices still held sensitive information. BlackBerrys (RIMM) contained the most, with 43% of those examined harboring data that could be considered a threat to the individual or the organization.

On Oct. 31, the EPA released new guidelines for annihilating all data on mobile devices, and businesses have even more reason to take notice of their cell phones' potential threat to confidentiality - and do something about it.

Too Many Standards

"Companies have tended to put a lot of emphasis on how to handle their older laptops and desktops but have not thought about the fact that their phones tend to have as much sensitive information as computers," says Mike Newman, a vice-president at ReCellular in Dexter, Mich., a large recycler and reseller of cellular phones in the U.S. "the problem is that manufacturers don't make it self-evident how to erase it," he says, adding that the process is different for each phone. Depending on the BlackBerry model, anywhere from 7 to 17 steps are needed to erase data from a handset. To compound the problem, no single industry standard exists for recyclers.

ReCellular has created its own standard for data destruction on mobile devices and works with large companies that want to erase sensitive information from employee devices. "We've processed millions of phones with this standard and never once have had private data compromised," says Newman. He points out that his company's Web site contains free instructions for erasing data on mobile devices from 23 different manufacturers. In fact, ReCellular assisted the EPA create guidelines for the destruction of data on mobile devices as part of the EPA's broader Responsible Recycling Practices for Electronics Recyclers project.

In January the EPA initiated a consumer awareness campaign to encourage cell-phone recycling. The agency says not even 20% of all mobile phones are recycled, and Nokia (NOK) believes the number is even lower, maintaining that just 3% of people have ever recycled their old handsets (BusinessWeek.com, 7/8/08). The EPA estimates that if the 100 million U.S. mobile devices eligible for refurbishing were actually recycled this year, we could save enough to power more than 194,000 U.S. households with electricity for one year. Nokia's survey of 6,500 people in 13 countries found that respondents owned, on average, five phones, and about 44% of those phones were still sitting at home, likely in a drawer.

Halting Toxic Waste

The idea is to stop mobile devices from ending up in landfills, where they leak toxic waste, including lead, cadmium, and mercury. So the first choice for recyclers is to resell a phone, and if it can't be reused, the second choice is to dismantle it, incinerate the plastic, and recover the metals.