Give a new life to your used mobile
Some 65% of used mobile phones are put in a drawer in Europe. Only 10% of the phones end up to recycling at the moment. Mobile phone users are encouraged to return their used devices to responsible take back points, and help to save materials and energy.
According to Accenture's recent study only 10% of used mobile phones are returned for recycling in Europe. Still more than half of them are kept at home in drawers, and 18% of them are given to someone else for their use. The priority in take back is still in brown and white goods, mobile phones are not considered that important yet.
There are several take back channels available for mobile phones. The combination of the channels varies from country to country depending on for instance recycling infrastructure and culture. The manufacturers, like Nokia, have only limited control over the channels. In Europe, people can return their old devices to Club Nokia Service Points, industry schemes collection points, to municipal collection points or to shops in the connection of different campaigns. In Asia-Pacific mobile phones can be taken to Nokia Care Centers. In USA Nokia is piloting various take back systems including possibility to send used devices to Nokia in envelope. Nokia take back channels can be found in our Recycling Map.
Read more about Recycling Map.
Nokia does not carry out refurbishment business as a company, or support any refurbishment carried out by refurbishment companies, at the moment. The reasons are that Nokia has no control over the quality or safety of the phones that are resold after restoration. Furthermore, Nokia would not like to see the third world a place where industrialized world dumps old technology. A more sustainable solution is to utilize the significant advances made in technology in the past decade, and offer products that are optimized for developing markets, where recycling infrastructure is often lacking.
Nokia is not recycling the used products by itself. From collection points the returned mobile phones will be sent to carefully selected recycling facilities that take care of the treatment of mobile phones in addition to other electronic waste.
Mobile phones contain mostly plastic, which is either recycled as material, and reused in e.g. in noise barriers, incinerated or landfilled. Recycling of plastic is somewhat more difficult than that of metals, as there are several different kind of plastics, separation technologies are undeveloped, plastics often contain impurities like paper, coatings and paint, and they are not usually economically feasible to recycle yet. Metals are separated by using metallurgical processes. Ceramic substances are left in the process waste, which is treated in an appropriate way. The parts containing hazardous substances, e.g. some old type of batteries, are treated by authorized facilities that have specialized in this particular field.
By taking mobile phones and their accessories to take back points people can help companies to close the loops, and return energy and materials back to circulation. The materials get new lives in new products, which means decreased energy and material consumption. Also here environment is everybody's business.