UK consumers are being urged to donate their old mobile phones to charity so they can be recycled or reused.

The country is steadily building a mobile phone mountain. Our love of these gadgets and the new services being offered means that most handsets sold now are upgrades.

Around five million mobile phones were sold in the run up to Christmas 2006 alone, according to recycling company Fonebak.

With over 15 million adults in the UK replacing their handset each year, more than half of them own at least one unused handset and one in 10 has four or more.

However, it appears UK consumers are very bad about recycling these gadgets; only a third has ever done this but four out of five people know it is possible.

The result is millions of old phones are lurking in people's homes. With the implementation of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive this month and the UK's lackadaisical attitude towards recycling of this equipment, Vodafone is reminding consumers that they can help those less fortunate than themselves and the environment.

Consumers can do this by donating obsolete handsets to charity rather than letting them gather dust in a drawer, or joining the 11.3 million that annually end up in landfill, incinerated or exported as waste.

There are a number of schemes that will take unused, broken or obsolete handsets and charities that can benefit. Vodafone's particular partnership is with The National Autistic Society using recycling company, Fonebak's programme.

People can either send the phones back free of charge by picking up a Freepost envelope from the company or drop them off in a Vodafone store. The phones are sent to Fonebak, which refurbishes the handsets and batteries where possible for re-use.

Those that cannot be refurbished are broken down into their various components, which are then recycled into other products such as traffic cones or buckets.

People interested donating old handsets can log onto Vodafone's or Fonebak's websites to get more information on either the NAS scheme or the other 600 charities that benefit from Fonebak's Community Fonebak recycling programme.