Mobile phones, pagers, Blackberries, Trios, Palm Pilots, and other “personal communications devices” may make it easier for us to keep in touch, but Mother Nature sure doesn’t like the signals they send.

By 2007, at least 750 million mobile phones alone will need to be recycled in the US. The ones we haven’t gotten around to clearing out yet are probably taking up valuable space in our sock drawers. If we have simply thrown them out, lots of them may be headed to the local landfill.

That would be too bad. Cell phones and their electronic cousins can leak lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other toxic substances into the water supply. If they’re incinerated by your local municipality instead, these chemicals might end up in the air, then return to earth as contaminated rain water. That’s why the EPA considers cell phones hazardous waste. That’s also why you should find an alternative to tossing them in the trash when you replace the old with the new.

Your options? Collective Good recycles donated phones for reuse in Latin America, the Caribbean, or elsewhere in the developing world. You can easily mail your phone to Collective Good by downloading a form from their website. You can also drop off your phone at any one of hundreds of local Staples supply stores, which collects phones for Collective Good.

Added bonus: The value of your donated phone is tax deductible; so is whatever it costs to ship the phone to Collective Good. You can pick a charity, like Earth Share, the country’s largest environmental federation, to receive a portion of the profits Collective Good earns from its enterprise. You can also collect used phones at your workplace and mail them directly to Collective Good, designating the charity of your choice to receive the benefit.

By the way, later this month, FedEx Kinko’s plans to start cell phone recycling at its outlets as well. I’ll let you know when that’s up and running.

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