A battle is brewing between friends of gorillas and tree-huggers over who'll recycle your old mobile, reports extratech editor Richard Conrad in this week’s Herald Sun.

How’s this for a great big green guilt trip for mobile-phone lovers? You are killing gorillas!

Melbourne Zoo recently launched a campaign to mobilise us into donating our old phones to the They're Calling on You recycling program, which supports primate conservation.

But the mobile-phone industry here already has its own recycling program, MobileMuster, in partnership with leading tree-planting group Landcare

Australia.

At the core of the controversy is a metallic ore called columbite-tantalite - or coltan, for short – from which the metal tantalum is extracted. It's used to coat capacitors in mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets.

Coltan mining is carried out in the middle of the habitat of the endangered Eastern Lowland gorilla in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in central Africa.

Activists are branding coltan as "the blood diamond of the telecommunications industry".

A Melbourne Zoo spokesperson says their campaign has so far collected more than 3400 mobiles, signed up 20 businesses and 17 schools, and raised more than $3000 towards the wages of wildlife rangers in the Congo.

Collected mobiles are refurbished for sale, raising these funds and reducing the need to mine more coltan.

Debby Cox, from primate habitat conservation group the Jane Goodall Institute, says most of the coltan mining is done illegally in protected areas by rebel forces using forced labour.

"This has caused major destruction of gorilla and chimpanzee habitat, and increased the prevalence of bushmeat hunting since the labour force needs to eat and are miles from communities or supplies," she says.

"It is a spiralling effect. Wildlife authorities have no manpower or firepower to stop them; military forces are unable to stop them.

"The sale of the coltan is one of the main economic drivers for the continuation of the war in eastern DRC - similar to the blood diamonds of Sierra Leone - and used by rebel forces to finance their war."

Cox says the They're Calling on You campaign makes it easy for mobile phone owners to make a difference.

"It would be great if this campaign could be a national Australian campaign and I know Melbourne Zoo and the Jane Goodall Institute are working on this," she says.

Besides recycling our old mobiles through this campaign, Cox says we should replace our mobiles with new models less often.

The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association says the mobile-phone industry condemns illegal mining in environmentally protected regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the devastation caused to the gorilla population.

CEO Chris Althaus says its members ask suppliers of tantalum to verify and certify that illegally mined African tantalum has not been used in the manufacture of electronic equipment.

But the mobile-phone industry does not buy tantalum directly; it's in the capacitors that mobile-phone manufacturers buy to make handsets.

"Though the majority of the world's known reserves of coltan are found in the Congo, less than 15 per cent of the coltan used in capacitors comes from the African continent," Althaus says. "The vast majority of the material used in capacitors is mined in Australia."

Althaus says use of tantalum in mobile phones is being phased out through the use of ceramic capacitors. "Most new models of mobile phones do not use tantalum capacitors," he says.

"Mobile-phone recycling is playing an important role in recovering essential metals and plastics for re-use, preventing potentially harmful substances ending up in landfill and reducing society's demand on our precious natural resources."

But the MobileMuster recycling does not extract tantalum.

MobileMuster, in partnership with Landcare Australia, is planting 175,000 trees around Australia as part of an "Old Phones, More Trees" program.

One tree is planted for each mobile phone handed in for recycling in the lead-up to World Environment Day.

About 8.87 million mobile phones were imported into Australia in the 2007-08 financial year.

Links: MobileMuster www.mobilemuster.com.au