Mobile phone recycling has become an easy way of both clearing out the kitchen drawer of crapola we all have, and earning a few extra bob. Except when the website you sent your mobiles to goes to the wall before you’re paid – welcome to the world of Earth Mobile.

Businesses go bust all the time, but that’s not what’s irritating customers in the MSE forums, as well as avid Bitterwallet reader Alasdair:

“The obvious problem is that there are a lot of people out there who had sent in their mobiles and haven’t been paid. Most of these mobiles were sent in a long time ago, and as the company promised to pay “within 7 days” and haven’t paid for months or so… clearly they knew that this was coming but still accepted phones and offered to pay for them.”

According to these reports, Earth Mobile were whipping up plenty of interest by offering the best prices on used mobiles, swaying consumers from choosing more established services. After seemingly stringing many customers along for weeks with promises of payment, all the while accepting handsets from new customers, the Earth Mobile site disappeared on Monday to be replaced with a message stating the company has ceased trading.

The company operated through a rented PO Box number, but a dig through the details at Companies House (which still shows Earth Mobile Ltd as trading) and other websites show Earth Mobile was operated by Russell Malcolm Tilbury, and numerous searches reveal several addresses in the Windsor area. He certainly cast his business net far and wide; Earth Mobile appears to have been trading on eBay in both China and France.

Since Monday, Tilbury has gone to ground, taken his customers money and their mobiles with him. We’ve tried to call all the numbers littered about the internet, but all resolve in recorded messages or full mailboxes. There seems to be no footprint outside Earth Mobile for Tilbury or the company’s other director, Katie Iliffe. MSE members have reported recording the issue with Trading Standards; in the meantime, we’ll keep hunting for the elusive Mister Tilbury.

The field round the back of Bitterwallet HQ, yesterday.

We’re not sure if it falls into the category of ‘political correctness gone mad’ or ‘broken Britain’ but the new nine-bin refuse system introduced by bonkers council officials in Newcastle-Under-Lyme has got our heads a-spinning on this lazy Sunday morning.

A labyrinth of different-coloured bins and bags, a local resident described it as: “a genuine tragedy. Whatever happened to the days when you could just hurl your rubbish out into the garden and then set fire to it all once a month when there was a full moon?” Well, she didn’t really but most newspapers make up quotes and attribute them nameless locals so we thought we’d do the same.

According to the Telegraph (who are a proper, big paper and would surely NEVER make up quotes) the new bin system: “includes a silver slop bucket for food waste, which is then emptied into a larger, green outdoor bin. There is a pink bag for plastic bottles, a blue box for glass, foil, tins and aerosols, a green bag for cardboard and blue bags for paper and magazines. Clothing and textiles go in a white bag, garden waste in a wheelie bin with a brown lid and non-recyclable waste in a separate grey wheelie bin.”

Phew, eh readers? Almost makes you hanker for a return to the rubbish-burning days of yore. Only thing is that a recent Environment Department report concluded that the burning of rubbish by lazy sods like us is the biggest contributor to poisonous, cancer-causing dioxins in the air.

WHY WON’T THEY LET US LIVE?

The modern relationship is an unusual beast. Sometimes your significant other will get right on your wick to the extent that you’d like to be able to fold them up and put them in a cupboard as if they were an old sock.

Who knows – if you’re one of those people who spends all of their days trolling assorted websites on the internationally-recognised Internet, maybe your significant other IS an old sock. Boom, and indeed, tish.

This Norwegian recycling ad shows you just how easy it can be to fold up an annoying partner but it’s cardboard cartons that we’re being taught to fold and recycle rather than old socks. Still, socks, boxes, any port in a storm, eh fellas?

Right then, be honest, how many of you recycle your batteries once they’ve ran out of doing-juice? We’re betting that it isn’t very many of you, mainly because there are so few battery recycling locations out there.

Spank yourself firmly on the back of the wrist if you’re still planning to hurl your spent batteries in the bin because that isn’t an excuse any more. New legislation came into force on Monday this week, and now any retailer who sells more than 32kg of batteries in a year (the equivalent of one pack of 4 AA batteries per day) must provide a recycling point for your simple and convenient battery dumpage.

At the moment, 97% of an estimated 30,000 tonnes of batteries eventually end up in landfill sites every year, where they can leak toxic chemicals into the soil. Under the new legislation, the aim is to ensure that 45% of batteries are recycled by 2016.

The recycling bins will be regularly emptied free of charge under the government’s Battery Compliance Scheme and if flogging one pack of AAs per day qualifies a retailer for the scheme, we imagine that the shops should now be full of battery recycling bins. Bet they’re not though.

Here’s a multi-pound promotional video that has been produced by Defra to launch this high-profile initiative. Mightily impressive stuff…

[Thanks to HotUKDeals member peter_griffen]

Recently, frugality has gained a certain mystique. Suddenly it’s “OK”- trendy even- to buy from thrift shops and clip vouchers for the supermarket.

There are plenty of us out there, however, who have always been frugal, even through the dot com boom. The World War II generation were thrifty by necessity, and most of  today (even cheapskates) can learn from them about the things we’re capable of living without, like premium satellite channels.

But at what point does frugality cross the line into plain craziness? Perhaps it is like any bad habit in that when it interferes with your daily life, you know you have a problem. Here are a few examples:

1. Thrifty, not crazy: investing £69.99 in a decent coffee maker and not stopping at the local “Fourbucks” on the way to work. In less than two months, the coffee maker will have paid for itself in what you save from not buying fancy coffee.

2. Crazy thrifty: trying to recycle coffee grounds

3. Thrifty, not crazy: buying things like baby wipes in bulk to get the best deal

4. Crazy thrifty: cutting each wipe into four pieces in an attempt to minimize the price further

5. Thrifty, not crazy: trying to walk, bike, or take public transportation to keep petrol costs under control.

6. Crazy thrifty: hitchhiking

7. Thrifty, not crazy: reusing carrier bags

8. Crazy thrifty: reusing dental floss

In other words, thriftiness should be about getting the most for your money, not just being Mr. (or Ms.) Skinflint. The people over at stopbuyingcrap.com have a good take on this philosophy. We’ve all had moments of thinking, “If I hadn’t bought this thing, I could have bought that thing that I really want.” The key is figuring out what “this” is so you can avoid buying it next time. If you do that enough, you’re being thrifty without being crazy.

[Wisebread]

The vending machine. Nana’s chicken dinner and Flight Control aside, has man ever created anything as perfectly marvellous as a machine that gives us chocolate and crisps? Of course not.

But what fresh hell is this? It looks like a vending machine, but it’s not – it’s a reverse vending machine:

The bizarro vending machine lets you stuff it full of recyclable products – plastic, glass and aluminum cans – in return for shopping vouchers. Made by Australian firm Envirobank, these branded contraptions are already been trialled in Oz.

[RedFerret]

When you lie awake in bed giving serious consideration to car boot sales and taking days off work to sort through the garage and register boxes of crap on eBay, you know times are getting tough.

So not so long ago we ran a feature on websites that buy your old mobile phones for cash, providing a way to pay a few bills with a drawer full of handsets. A similar website has just launched, but one that seems to give with one hand and take away with the other.

Mobile Cash Monster is doing things differently, because not not only will they take your old mobiles phones, but inkjet cartridges and iPods too. Last time we compared four similar sites for the exchange values of a 16Gb iPhone and broken Sony Ericsson W810. Mobile Cash Monster will offer up £135 for the iPhone and £12 for the W810, meaning the rates are comparable to Love2Recycle and Mobile Phone Exchange, and better than the likes of Mobile2Cash and mopay.co.uk.

So good rates for clearing out your disused handsets, plus you get to make cash on your old printer cartridges and iPods. That’d be a pretty decent deal, except that you’re not paid in cash, you’re paid in Amazon gift vouchers. Ah. So your electric bill isn’t going to get paid as a result after all. And can’t Amazon vouchers be bought in bulk?

Opening up such a scheme to cartridges and iPods is a great idea – it’d be nice to see that thinking extended to other brands of Mp3 players, and other gadgets, too – but aligning with a specific business so there’s little choice but to buy even more crap doesn’t seem all that helpful when money’s tight.

Fancy growing your own tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries etc etc but don’t have (or can’t afford) a greenhouse? That’s not a problem in this age of recycling and whatnot.

All you need is approximately 1400 plastic bottles, a lot of time and a bit of help and hey presto, you’ve got yourself a free greenhouse. The one in the picture has been constructed at Byker Farm in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in amongst citywide hysteria at the return of Alan Shearer, the great saviour.

You might not be able to get your hands on 1400 bottles overnight, but the idea is a great one for schools, colleges and community projects to get their teeth into. Our finders fee for this story is one punnet of juicy strawberries – email them to the usual address.

(Pic by Hayley Green. Some rights reserved)

National Recycle Your Phone Week? Well get out the bunting and throw a street party. As far as events go, its right up there with Be Nice to Nettles Month and Fondle a Horse Thursday. This occasion is more useful than either, given that you can recycle your old handset and make some proper cash.

4 out of 5 people have more than one unused mobile, while over 1.5 million old phones are binned every year. The week isn’t just to highlight our wasteful ways, but raise awareness of the potentially hazardous chemical components of the handsets – cadmium, lead and mercury – and our part in disposing of them safely.

Yeah yeah, whatever. Sod the environment, let’s get to the beef. How much coin can you make for recycling an old mobile phone? Quite a lot, as it turns out. (more…)

Recycling is the new cool, and Jeremy Mayer has found new ways to turn trash into stunning robotic works of art.

Jeremy has been making robots out of typewriters for over a decade, when he was first in a small Iowa town.

And when you’re in a little town in Iowa, there aren’t many better things to do.

(more…)