Seth Heine, CollectiveGood International

Charity begins at home. At least that's where Seth Heine first realized that the old but perfectly serviceable mobile handset he had stashed away in a drawer might still serve a purpose.

Heine knew that about 85% of Latin America has no landline service, a problem he encountered firsthand while working in Brazil and Panama as a consultant for BellSouth. Conversely, more than 200 million cell phones are now littering landfills across the U.S., most still in good working condition but replaced in favor of newer, more advanced models.

“We live in a disposable mindset society,” Heine said. “People throw away all kinds of crap everyday. There are millions of phones sitting around. I just needed to figure out a simple mechanism for reuse.”

Heine figured it out in May 2000 and founded CollectiveGood International, which recycles and repurposes discarded mobile phones for distribution across Latin America and the Caribbean, and offers U.S. consumers a socially and environmentally responsible method of disposing of unwanted wireless devices. CollectiveGood also raises funds for charities, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the American Humane Association (no doubt a favorite charity of Heine's dog, Dakotah, pictured here).

By visiting CollectiveGood's Web site, users can download a donation form, designate a charity and print mailing labels for the program's Ocala, Fla., refurbishment center. Donations are tax-deductible, as are shipping costs. After cleaning and refurbishment, the phones are sold to regional carriers and distributors, which make them available in underserved areas at roughly 25% of the cost of a new phone.

As of the end of 2001, CollectiveGood had collected about 12,000 phones. Heine is pleased by the project's progress, with one small caveat. “What's amazing is how very quickly people became savvy about phones and how quickly they knew that the brick phone is yesterday's news,” he said. “All of a sudden our business model is predicated on some guy running around a rain forest on the perimeter of Guatemala who's demanding a flip phone.”