How can you be a vet or a forest ranger or a race car driver when you don’t have animals, trees or petrol? The answer lies in recycling. We all knew that and now Nokia has reminded us again. They have gone one step further by committing to plant a tree for every phone you recycle.

Nokia advising people to recycle old phones is like teaching fish how to swim. Thank you very much, but we have been recycling not just phones but almost everything we use and we do it a lot more effectively than you.

Let’s see what you can do in India when it comes to recycling. No Indian throws out his old newspaper because he can sell them for 5 bucks a kilo. You don’t throw your old beer bottles because each sells for 2 bucks. I can trade my old clothes for stainless steel utensils. I can call an “old paper mart” guy and he will come running to my home and will buy almost anything I may want to get rid of, old computers, plastic cans, cables, and the iron which doesn’t iron clothes anymore.

That is not all, in India have you ever seen a car yard full of scrapped old cars? I guess not, because in India we can sell even that. The last Premier Padmini last rolled out of an assemble line some 15 years ago but you can still sell an old model for 5 grands.

In a nutshell, we squeeze more out of anything than the western world. I don’t have any data to prove it but I am willing to bet a substantial amount of money on the fact that the average life of anything in India is longer than it is in the west, be it a car, a phone, a computer or anything else and once we have used it, we don’t throw it away, we trade our old phones for new and things that can’t be traded are usually sold to junk dealers.

This campaign to recycle phone may make sense in other parts of the world, not in India because here we are not only doing it, but doing it profitably. The incentive for us in recycling an old phone is hard cash, not just the satisfaction of knowing someone will plant a tree.

I appreciate the initiative by Nokia to help the environment. It will be even better if they go one step further by removing planned obsolesce from their products. Stop introducing new models every month. I like the model of Apple that has just one phone and the life per user of an iphone is much higher than any other phone.

It is understandable that most phone companies can’t be like Apple because they have to cater to a much wider market, even then, isn’t it a good idea to have fewer models in different price ranges that are long lasting and won’t be made obsolete in two months?