In the coming weeks, Fairphone will be launching a program to encourage the Fairphone community to recycle their old phones. Those phones that are decades old in a drawer, or the one you were meaning to sell but is still on a shelf (we all seem to have a couple).
Fairphone has already put together this list of local recyclers, but we also want to give the opportunity to recycle (and refurbish) high-value old phones. Any revenue from these refurbished phones will contribute to social interventions on the Fairphone road map. Soon we’ll allow Fairphone owners to ship high-value phones (for free)* to our recycling partner.
For the Belgian mobile phoners:
There’s a program to give your old phone and instead they will plant new trees
Curieus BelBos - Call a tree
Exchange your old self-phone for a brand new tree
Only 1% of all self-phones worldwide is being recycled in a correct way. Nevertheless, in those old phones are plenty precious materials, who we can perfectly recycle and re-use (silver, gold, coltan…). We wanted to create more awareness about this matter (and urban mining). Plus, because Flanders is one of the least afforrested regions, we linked those two environmental challenges. That’s why Curieus organizes a second edition of BelBos (literally translated something like “Call a tree” .
For each scrapped (broken) self-phone Curieus collects (and recycles via the professional partners SIMS Recycling and Umicore), we plant a tree. We are a non-profit organization, so every Euro we collect with the recycling of the self-phones, we invest in the BelBos.
Last year, we could plant this way 10 000 trees (because we collected almost 10 000 self-phones). Here you can find the locations of the first 7 new woods (BelBossen).
