If Apple's iPhone lives up to its hype and 10 million are sold in the first 18 months, environmentalists and others fear an unprecedented avalanche of electronic waste, as consumers decide they no longer need their cell phones, BlackBerrys or iPods.

David Kutoff sees this as a teachable moment.

He's president and chief executive of Materials Processing in Eagan, Minn., which has collected electronic waste, or e-waste, for nearly 25 years.

"If I throw my 1-pound cell phone in the garbage buried in a plastic bag, who's going to notice? It's not like a 25-inch TV," said Kutoff, 29, who bought the business in January with partner Todd Schachtman, 33.

"But if everyone recycles their phones, close to 1.5 million pounds of cell phones won't wind up in the garbage can," he said. "It's the difference between everybody saying, 'Who cares?' and everyone saying, 'We can do our part.' It's all about education."

The average American has three to five unused phones lying around, which stacks up to a nationwide total of 750 million.

About 130 million a year are tossed into the trash, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, even though the phones are filled with all sorts of toxic material.

The sense of urgency is twofold. The phones contain gold and other valuable metals that are expensive and destructive to scrape out of the earth. If all the obsolete phones in storage were rounded up and recycled -- about 500 million of them -- the metals would amount to $340 million, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Many cell phones also are loaded with hazardous materials like cadmium, arsenic, copper and lead -- stuff you don't want leaching out of landfills or incinerated in garbage burners.

Some retailers already are gearing up for a boost in cell-phone recycling.

Best Buy offers free postage-paid envelopes for new customers to recycle their phones with ReCellular, which sells them to raise money for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

Last month, Staples announced it would begin accepting old cell phones, computers and other electronics.

At Materials Processing, Kutoff pulls in about 30,000 to 60,000 cell phones a month from business customers and consumers who drop them off. A few of the phones are wiped clean of personal data and resold. Most are separated into parts that get sold to companies that can reuse the pieces. The cobalt in the batteries gets recovered and turned into new batteries. The precious metals in the circuitry get stripped out and could wind up in your new computer's microprocessing chip, Kutoff said.