More than 5 billion phones to end up in landfill this year as old mobiles thrown away

Lined up next to each other, discarded phones would stretch around whole equator, Mustafa Qadri reports

The total global stock of mobile phones is estimated to be 16 billion (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

More than 5 billion mobile phones will become waste around the world this year, new data suggests.

If stacked on top of each other, the phones would make a tower more than 30,000 miles tall, 120 times higher than the International Space Station. The disused phones could also stretch the entire way around the equator.

The data from the UN Institute for Training and Research suggests only a small fraction of the 5.3 billion phones will be properly disposed of.