Why set up this pilot project?

The initiative of the mobile phone collection project was born out of the importance to evolve towards a more sustainable and circular economy. As private mobile phones contribute to a large share of today’s e-waste (up to 8 million unused mobile phones can be found in Belgian and Dutch households), action needs to be taken. Due to the large potential of these old phones, the pilot project aims to collect employees’ phones through an awareness and collection campaign.

Stages of the campaign

1. Raising awareness through interactive communication

In the first stage, three companies will motivate their employees to donate their old mobile phones. Accenture, ENGIE and Ordina will kick-off this internal campaign on October 15th 2018, closely following International E-Waste Day on October 13th. The first phase of the project is focused on interactive communication and raising awareness. Employees will have access to an online platform and a quiz where they can test their knowledge about their own old devices.

2. Collection

In a second stage, everyone will then have two weeks to donate their phones in the collection boxes provided by Recupel, a Belgian non-profit association that is responsible for organising the collection and processing of discarded electr(on)ic appliances and light bulbs.

3. Processing

After the collection period, the donated phones will be processed in the third stage. The critical raw materials, the valuables such as gold, cobalt and aluminium, will be recycled in a sustainable way by Umicore.

4. Feedback

In a fourth stage, during the European Week for Waste Reduction (from November 17th until November 25th 2018), the results will be communicated to the employees. All revenue from the collected phones will be used to support innovative entrepreneurship by donating the funds raised to a tech start-up selected by Close the Gap.

Results

In total, we collected more than 700 old mobile devices. In total, an average of 1 phone per 10 employees was collected. Before donating their old phones, employees were engaged through a quiz to test their knowledge on the resources that are present in these phones. On average, 80% of the participants of the quiz were aware that more than 70% of these resources can be recycled. Even more promising is the number of people that is prepared to recycle their phones: more than 85% of the respondents said they were definitely interested to do so.

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RecyCall was founded by two young entrepreneurs (Domien Declercq & Laura Morel) and is currently following the KBC Start-It program. Recy-Call collects mobile phones through schools and is preparing a large scale collection in developing countries to combat worldwide electronic waste. In other words, their start-up is very closely connected to the mission of this collection pilot. We do hope that with the support we offer them, RecyCall will be able to further develop their innovative initiative.