Many of us, (around 1,5 billion every year) have a brand new phone that we’re just getting used to. More often than not, this is bad news for our previous trusty companion. Our “old” phone, that’s been by our side for the last 2 years or so, is about to disappear into the obscure graveyard for electronics. You know what we mean – that drawer or box where the things go we can’t quite let go. Maybe we don’t really trust our new phone yet – we’ll hold onto the old one as a fail-safe. Maybe we have an inkling that this piece of hardware doesn’t belong in the trash, but we don’t know what to do with it.

Living room pollution

Whatever the reason, the end result remains the same: Old electronics stack up over the years, collecting dust and polluting our drawers, cabinets or boxes. Eventually, this flood of “maybe-later” devices spills out from our homes, contributing to the bigger issue. Nearly 50 million tons of e-waste is produced every year – that’s more than 6 kilograms for every person on the planet.

But what if those phones still had life left in them after all? What if they could prevent millions of kilos of CO2 from entering our atmosphere? Or change the life of a small business owner in Ghana? Or even make a brand new phone a little bit fairer?

Support the fight against e-waste

We want to end the cycle of wasting valuable resources and we’ve got ambitious plans for reducing e-waste. Help us reach our target of collecting 20,000 phones in 2020 – We’re so close! Together, we’ve managed to save more than 16.000 old phones from dusty drawers and landfills already. If we all take an afternoon to dig up those old phones, there’s no doubt we can reach our goal this year.

Join the Fairphone recycling program! By recycling and reusing old phones, we can give them new lives in new homes, or recover valuable materials like gold, copper and palladium. We can reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing new phones, AND make the environment inside our messy drawers a bit cleaner, freeing up some much-needed space for 1980s floppy disks, random lengths of string, and loose paper clips.

Compared to the good it can do, the reasons for keeping old phones in the drawer start to pale into insignificance. That backup? Let’s face it, at best you only need your last phone. And even then, maybe only one person in the house needs one (after all, sharing is caring!).

Get your free shipping label now

Reuse and recycling start with you. Dig out those phones and start recycling! We promise we’ll take good care of your old friend: after all, every phone you recycle is another step towards a brighter, fairer future for all of us.

Do you hear that sound? It’s your old phone calling you to send it on a new adventure. We’ll let you go answer it now. Get started by applying for your free shipping label here >>

Curious what happens to your old phone, after you send it in? Find out what happens to your phones once they reach our recycling partner >>
(Spoiler alert: 55% get refurbished and 45% get recycled).