Only 3 percent of old mobile phones have so far been recycled worldwide, Finland's biggest mobile phone maker Nokia said Tuesday in its latest survey report.

The report, based on surveys of about 6,500 mobile phone users in 13 countries, said that three quarters of mobile phone users had not considered recycling their old phones, and almost half did not even know it was possible.

Markus Terho, director of environmental affairs at Nokia, said if each of the 3 billion mobile phone users across the world brought back just one idle device, a total of 240,000 tons of raw material would be saved and there would be a huge reduction in the volume of greenhouse gases, similar to the effect of taking 4 million cars off the road.