Seven leading mobile phone manufacturers from home and abroad have promised to recollect and dispose out-of-use cell phones to help reduce mounting environment pollution by their electronic products.

The phone makers, including Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Haier, along with Weicheng Environment Protection Technology Co. and China Forum of Environmental Journalists, launched a cell phone environmental protection program yesterday in Beijing, calling phone makers to take the responsibility of disposal of their handsets and phone fittings.

Favoring the joint move, Pan Yue, vice director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said the country's environment authority is considering an introduction of a similar recall system and will unveil a new regulation to extend the responsibility to electronic product manufacturers of re-collection and disposal of their products after being out of use.

Discarded electronic products have posed a serious threat to China's environment due to the high containment of pollutants such as mercury, nickel and lead, environment exports pointed out.

According to their estimation, an average 7,000 tons of handsets are out of use each year in the country and the discarded electronic products top 1 million tons.

In addition to mobile phones, the electronic products mainly include home appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, TV sets and computers.

China is not the first country to consider putting the recycling responsibility on electronic product companies, the experts said.

The European Union, for example, has enacted regulations this February to require electronic manufacturers of products in 100 categories to recollect, recycle and dispose their products.

The companies are also banned to use pollutive materials in their products from July 1 2006.

(People's Daily November 3, 2003)