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After writing my article –Calling on the Congo- on coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I became more interested in the issue and decided to become involved in the mobile phone recycling being run jointly by the Jane Goodall Institute of Australia and Zoo’s Victoria.

I started by approaching my University’s Science and Technology department because a) They are likely to be most interested in an issue affecting the environment and b) I am a science student so hopefully they would respond positively to my request. The University was very helpful, and fully supported the idea, offering to send emails out to all Science and Technology staff and tell them about the new project. It was a great relief to have a good start to the project on campus.

I realised that the only way I was going to be able to get students to donate mobile phones was by advertising the project through flyers and posters. As it would be quite expensive to do this out of my own pocket I sought out sponsorship from Officeworks- a major printing and stationary company here in Australia. The whole experience was probably the best I have had in seeking sponsorship, they were very enthusiastic and tried to meet most of my needs eg. printing on both sides of the paper, colour and trying to source recycled paper.

They ended up doing the whole printing job for free! And I have included a picture of the final product here.

The campaign is going really well on campus and I have joined forces with the Environmental Club which will hopefully help get the word out there! In the meantime I have also started doing a series of talks with a secondary school student called Mattie who is really interested in the issue. So far we have done a talk at his school together where we collected 17 phones and are about to do another two talks this week to a total of 100 + people.

It was an amazingly easy thing to set up and the issue of coltan mining is recieving some interest in Australian media now. Especially since it is the Year of the Gorilla- and these beautiful animals are directly affected by the illegal mining occuring with the National parks borders where they live.

Here is an example which featured on The Age website on the 10/05/09- click here.