The average cell phone is used for less than 18 months and 140 million of them end up in a landfill every year. (Statistics) Landfills are slowly filling up with our obsolete cell phones. Phone circuits are coated in lead, and lithium-ion batteries often explode in landfills, creating craters of toxic heavy metal waste for future generations to deal with. Even if efforts are made to recycle this waste, the problem will get worse before it gets better as more and more of the world's citizens adopt cell phones.