In case you didn’t know it, today starts National Recycle Your Cell Phone Week (April 6-12, 2009), an event designed to get everyone pumped up about Earth Day (April 22). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has gotten in on this event because, it says “only ten percent of cell phones are recycled each year, and most people do not know where to recycle them. Recycling cell phones results in significant environmental savings and can also benefit communities.”

To be honest we’ve been stockpiling cell phones at our house, mostly because we wanted to have backup handsets to use should be manage to fry a phone and didn’t want to pay for a replacement. That’s what happened last year, after I was eligible for an upgrade and decided to go for a slim silver Motorola Razr phone instead of my clunky LG clamshell phone that I’d had since 2005. I opted against insurance, and two months later, the phone fell out of my hand and cracked in half–literally splinted into two pieces. I was able to log onto the VerizonWireless website and reprogram my cell phone number into my old phone, now that the new (and now broken) Razr was worthless.

Since one of my daughters was eligible for a phone upgrade last month, we went to our local Verizon Wireless store this weekend to get her a new phone. (She, too, has a habit of frying phones.) I decided to bring all of our old cell phones and their batteries with me to drop off in the Verizon Wireless’s phone recycling bin, because I knew that National Recycle Your Cell Phone Week was coming up. Also, with Verizon Wireless a partner in the event, I wanted to support its Verizon’s Hopeline program, which supports victims of domestic violence and benefits when people recycle their cell phones through them.

Besides Verizon Wireless, here are the other stores and companies that have partnered with National Recycle Your Cell Phone Week:

AT&T

Best Buy

LG Electronics

Sony Ericsson

Sprint

Staples

T-Mobile

You can find additional locations for cell phone recycling by visiting Earth911′s website. If you’re interested in finding places that will not only recycle your cell phones for you but may also give you cash for them, check out my blog posting from last September called “Recycling for Dollars.”

Of course, you should delete your personal information from your cell phone before bringing it in for recycling. The Recycle Wireless Phones website has instructions on how to do that erasing manually or where you can download a program that can do that erasing for you. (With my old Motorola Razr that cracked in half, there was nothing I could with regards to my personal information since you can’t even boot up the phone anymore.)

Here’s an interesting postscript to our visit this past weekend to Verizon Wireless: I learned that even if you do not have an insurance policy for your phone, if something happens to it after it is off warranty (usually 30 days) or before two years has elapsed, Verizon Wireless will replace your phone for $50. This is what we ended up doing with my daughter’s old phone, which was fine except it couldn’t charge, and because there were no “free” phone offers available for us to use. The cheapest “new phone” option was $80.

So this weekend we managed to be both green and frugal. Cool.