When I saw the title to this post I immediately thought : "Make a tacky Lamp out of it"
I guess it beats grinding them up and melting it down for the copper. I posted to a different board about this, thought you might find it interesting:
When I was in High School, AT&T built a phone recycling center near me in Gaston SC. I worked one summer constructing concrete forms to pour footings for an expansion.
There were several acers filled with huge mounds of different kinds of telephones piled higher than my head, Wire of all sorts and any sort of PBX and switching equipment you could name.
It all went into a sorting shed on a conveyor where the plastic was stripped out and the metal went into various smelters. They shipped out lots of copper ingots and occasionally some gold ingots. The first gold ingot they produced was a big deal in the papers with politicians all a smiling.
I remember thinking at the time "Geeze, what a shame to grind up all these neat looking old phones."
I quote:
"In 1987, four secondary copper smelters were in operation: ...and a facility located in Gaston, SC, that was owned by American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) until 1990 when it was purchased by Southwire Co. In 1987, estimated smelter capacities were... 85,000 kkg for the AT&T facility (Edelstein, 1999). "
One KiloGram = 2.2 pounds so one kkg = 2200 pounds and I guess 85,000 kkg is then about 187,000,000 pounds per year or about 93,500 tons a year if I carried the noughts right in my calculations. It was a huge operation.
"By 1995, only three of these four facilities were in operation. The Southwire facility in Gaston (previously owned by AT&T) was closed in January 1995.
... Prior to 1990, when this facility was owned by AT&T, the plant processed a great deal of high-plastics-content scrap (such as whole telephones). This scrap was fed to a pyrolysis unit prior to entering the blast furnace. In addition to a blast furnace, the facility also had an oxidizing reverberatory furnace for processing higher purity scrap. "
Even given that some of that was Central office equipment, Switchboards and PBX and pulled out transmission wire, If you think about it, that was a hella lot of telephone Lamps that AT&T took out of circulation.