Thinking of buying a new cell phone for Christmas? Don’t throw your old one away. Instead, recycle it.

Keep Covington Beautiful is providing a way to recycle your old cell phone. As the technology becomes more advanced and phones become cheaper, more people are buying new ones and discarding their old ones.

A cell phone recycling program with Sprint and ReCellular takes old phones and either refurbishes them for use or re-uses the materials for phones or other items, including replacement parts, car bumpers and aftermath rechargeable battery packs. Priscilla Flocca of KCB said phones that can be reused are resold to other mobile phone subscribers in the U. S. or sold in developing countries around the world as a low-cost alternative to a new phone. All personal information is removed from phones before recycling.

Simply pick up a mail-in bag at any St. Tammany Library branch, Covington City Hall or The Shipping Post in downtown Covington.

The mailer is free, and the phones are sent postage-free to be recycled. It is estimated about half of the phones will be reused.

The phones that can’t be rebuilt for use can be of use for their various materials, including gold, platinum, nickel and plastics.

The materials will be dismantled and smelted down to reclaim valuable materials. No materials collected from the cell phones will end up in landfills, said Flocca.

Annually, only about 2 percent of the 130 million cell phones replaced every year are recycled. This amounts to about 65,000 tons of used cell phones in landfills every year across the nation.

Flocca said the group will receive about 75 percent of the value of the phones recycled. But that isn’t the point. The point is to free the landfills and “Wipe Out Wireless Waste.”