Because we design our products to last and have a global Nokia service network to look after them, they keep working. But a lot of our phones are no longer used. Our global consumer survey reveals that 44% of old mobile phones are lying in drawers at home and not being recycled. Find out from our latest survey why only 3% of people recycle their mobile phones globally.

Why should you recycle a phone that’s not being used? Recycling means we don’t need to extract and refine as much material for new products, saving energy, chemicals and waste. If every Nokia user recycled just one unused phone at the end of its life, together we would save nearly 80,000 tonnes of raw materials.

Recycling gives your phone a second life

Is your unused phone cluttering up your desk drawer? If you no longer need your mobile device, you may consider giving it to one of your friends for use or then bring it back to us for recycling. Phones that can not be used anymore can be utilized otherwise - 100 percent of the materials in your phone can be recovered and used to make new products or generate energy.

We work with carefully selected companies who reclaim materials from the phones and accessories we pass on to them. These companies are assessed on a regular basis to make sure they’re doing things properly and that anything handed to them is recycled responsibly.

Download our short video (.wmv, 5.75 mb) that shows what happens to your phone in the recycling process and our did you know mini-movie (.wmv, 16.4 mb) about recycling.

Taking part in creating best practices

Nokia supports the concept of individual producer responsibility In order for us to carry out our own responsibilities we need others in the value chain, like consumers and retailers, to commit to bring back obsolete mobile devices for responsible recycling. Such co-operation eventually leads to a situation where significant drivers for environmentally optimised product design enabling easier recycling would become commonplace, bringing further benefits for consumers, producers and the environment.

We’ve been running take-back campaigns since the late 1990s and we regularly work with environmental organisations or non-governmental organisations such as WWF to increase consumer awareness in different markets around the world. We also work with others in our industry to improve recycling standards.

Nokia also participates in many projects to improve the way redundant phones are treated. These include the MPPI work group that has drafted global guidelines covering design, collection, refurbishment and recycling of mobile phones. We are also a member of StEP initiative (solving the e-waste problem), an industry and academia cooperation led by UN university.

Spreading the word about recycling

If we’re all going to recycle more, we need to let people know what recycling a mobile phone actually means and how easy it is to do. We want to help overcome some of the barriers to recycling phones, like worrying about losing the numbers or photos you’ve got stored on your phone.

These barriers mean that return rates from most of our collection schemes are currently very low; we get back just 3 percent of redundant phones. Nearly half of these are sitting unused in people’s drawers. As part of our we:recycle programme, we’re helping consumers, retailers and our service network bring those phones back for recycling.

What about refurbishment?

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 we have no control over the quality or safety of the phones that are resold after restoration. Furthermore, we would not like to see the third world a place where industrialised 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 optimised for developing markets, where recycling infrastructure is often lacking.

Simultaneously we are developing our take back procedures further also in developing markets.