ORONO – As area cell phone users get new cell phones for the holidays, Detective Sgt. Chris Gardner of University of Maine Public Safety hopes they’ll think about one of the newest charitable projects on campus when they consider tossing their old phones.

Gardner heads up the university’s cell phone recycling effort, which benefits Special Olympics. Telephones are repaired and refurbished, and either resold or donated for use by domestic abuse victims or Third World populations.

“It’s a win-win situation for us,” Gardner says, “because besides raising money for Special Olympics, we’re also doing something for the community, raising public awareness of people with intellectual disabilities and reinforcing relationships. Hopefully we’re giving something back to the communities in which we work.”

Since discarded cell phone collections started on campus in July, Public Safety has picked up more than 250 telephones at its Rangeley Road headquarters in Orono. Cell phone users are donating old phones at a rate of about 15 a month, he says – a good number, but a fraction of the number of cell phones probably sitting idly in desk drawers, bureaus or car trunks, he believes.

Special Olympics, which collects cell phones worldwide through local law enforcement and other agencies, estimates that in the United States alone, as many as 130 million cell phones are retired annually.

RMS Communications Group, a Florida-based company that repairs and refurbishes discarded cell phones, estimates that with nearly 200 million cell phone subscribers in the country currently, as many as 500 million cell phones are now sitting idle in people’s homes and offices, or are destined for landfills.

James Mosieur, CEO of RMS, said his company donates about 2,000 reusable cell phones a month to 200-300 agencies or organizations in the United States that distribute them to individuals in need under the RMS Foundation’s 911 Cell Phone Bank. The company also sells heavily discounted refurbished cell phones to Third World countries where cell phone towers are cheaper than stringing land-based telephone wires to rural populations.

RMS pays an average of $9 for every cell phone collected to benefit the Special Olympics. Locally, that could mean a lot of money. For instance, if 80 percent of the 14,000 students and employees on the UM campus owns a cell phone and if half replace them each year and donate those 5,600 old phones to Public Safety, that would generate more than $50,400 a year for Special Olympics.

The cell phone industry estimates that the life span of the average cell phone is 18 months.

Les Shaw, assistant director of Information Technologies at UM, which manages the UM cell phone contracts for departments at the university, says he believes very few people recycle old cell phones when they are taken out of service.

“I think it’s an awareness problem,” says Shaw, “and people might not realize there is another use for old cell phones.”

In fact, RMS estimates that 70 percent of cell phone users don’t realize their old phones can be recycled and reused, since less than 5 percent of obsolete cell phones are refurbished or recycled.

Of all the cell phone collection programs in Maine, the UM Public Safety effort has been the most productive so far, says Linda Frederickson of the Maine Special Olympics headquarters in Portland.

Since the program started in Maine last February, Frederickson estimates that 2,000 or more cell phones have been collected and donated for repair and refurbishment. She expects a boom in donated phones after the holidays.