By Eric Broude
Daily Titan Staff Writer

Pictured, an orphaned orangutan is one of the inhabitants of the Orangutan Care Center in Borneo, Indonesia. Palm plantations are taking a toll on forests and native species, such as orangutans. Cal State Fullerton’s Primatology Student Association is collecting old cell phones and ink cartridges for the Happy Hollow Park and Zoo in San Jose, Calif. The zoo runs recycles the items with ECO-CELL, generating funds for the Orangutan Conservancy. Photo courtesy MCT.

The profits from this fundraiser will go toward the preservation of orangutans, said Julie Cash, the club president.

The phones and ink cartridges the club collects will be given to the Happy Hollow Park and Zoo, which recycles the collections with ECO-CELL, a cell phone recycling program.

The zoo then donates all of the funds generated from the program to the Orangutan Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the “conservation of orangutans and their habitat,” according to its Web site.

The Conservancy channels this money into a general fund to be used by conservation groups centered on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the only places on Earth where orangutans still live in the wild, said Raffaella Commitante, a Cal State Fullerton lecturer and one of the vice presidents of the Orangutan Conservancy.

ECO-CELL does not simply recycle all of the phones.

Phones that are still in working condition are donated to developing countries, many of them in Africa, where people can purchase them inexpensively, said Peter Fashing, faculty advisor for the PSA.

“The drive is a multi-tiered project,” Cash said. “It helps the environment and (people in) developing countries, as well as primates.”

Orangutans are the most at risk of the great apes.

“Studies believe that if the destruction to their habitat continues at the same rate, then they could be extinct in as little as 20 years,” Cash said.

The orangutans are in danger from logging, hunting, forest fires and the destruction of forests for the purposes of collecting palm oil, Fashing said.

A series of bad years regarding forest fires caused by small fires burning out of control, due to the fuel of underground coal has been a great concern, Commitante said.

“The fires have become a yearly problem,” she said.

Commitante also said that young orangutans are often taken from their parents for the pet trade.

In some countries, they are thought to indicate positions of power and it is seen as prestigious to own an orangutan. There are centers full of formerly captive orangutans that have grown too large to handle, Commitante said.

“They have very human faces, so they are seen as a human child substitute,” Commitante added.
She also said that orangutans are less protected than other endangered primates.

“Gorillas have a much more romanticized image,” Commitante said. “Of the great apes, orangutans always seem to come in last.”

One of the main reasons orangutans are endangered, Fashing said, is that they reproduce very slowly.

“They have the longest mother-child bond (of any primate),” Commitante said. “The mother will stay around the child anywhere from five to eight years.”

She added that female orangutans only have an average of three offspring throughout their lives and almost always one at a time.

The drive is an ongoing project.

A collection box has been set up in the anthropology office in McCarthy Hall room 426.

The club meets every other Thursday at 4 p.m. in MH room 420.

“I force myself to be hopeful (for the orangutans), even though it doesn’t always seem like things are going well,” Commitante said. “I think there’s so much to learn from them.”