Nokia Press Bulletin Board

What happens to most mobile devices when people no longer use them? That was the question Nokia asked more than 6, 500 people in 13 countries around the world recently. The surprising results showed that most are stored away at home because very few of us don’t know that that they can be recycled or how to do this.  

The survey conducted in Finland, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA, Nigeria, India, China, Indonesia and Brazil, found that only 3% of people recycle their mobile phones. Very few are being thrown away (4%) instead the majority (44%) are simply kept at home and never used.   

Globally, 74% of consumers said they don’t think about recycling their phones, despite the fact that around the same number, 72%, think recycling makes a difference to the environment. Nearly half of those surveyed added that they were unaware that it was even possible to recycle a mobile.  

The survey found that one of the main reasons why so few people recycle their mobile phones is because they simply don’t know that it is possible to do so. In fact, up to 80% of any Nokia device is recyclable and precious materials within it can be reused to help make new products such as kitchen kettles, park benches, dental fillings or even saxophones and other metal musical instruments.  

Mr Terho said, “Using the best recycling technology nothing is wasted. Between 65 – 80 per cent of a Nokia device can be recycled. Plastics that can’t be recycled are burnt to provide energy for the recycling process, and other materials are ground up into chips and used as construction materials or for building roads. In this way nothing has to go to landfill.”  

The results will help Nokia find out more about consumers’ attitudes and behaviors towards recycling, and inform the company’s take-back programs and efforts to increase recycling rates of unused mobile devices.

Markus Terho, Director of Environmental Affairs, Markets, at Nokia said, “If each of the three billion people globally owning mobiles brought back just one unused device we could save 240,000 tonnes of raw materials and reduce greenhouse gases to the same effect as taking 4 million cars off the road. By working together, small individual actions could add up to make a big difference.”

www.nokia.com/werecycle

Nokia’s advanced design team today shared “Homegrown”, a long term research project looking at how Nokia can help people make more sustainable choices. The team is exploring specific environmental and social issues including recycling, energy and how to make the benefits of mobile technology available to more people. 

The project is being run by the same team who created Remade – a concept first shown at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year and that explores how recycled materials may be used in the future to make mobile devices. At today’s event in Nokia’s London design studio the team showed for the first time some of the other concept they are working on. These are: 

Zero Waste Charger concept - this explores ways to reduce the energy that is wasted when chargers are unplugged from a mobile device but left plugged into a live mains socket.  

People First concept – this concept takes three human universals of the way people think about communication – time, lists, and people – to inspire and examine new user interface ideas.  

Wears in, not out concept – as more services become available on our mobile devices this concept explores how people could potentially upgrade their devices digitally rather than physically in the future, giving people an additional choice on how they use and update their mobile phones.  

The design team developing these concepts works on a time frame of looking three to five years out into the future. By sharing some of these ideas and stimulating a discussion they hope to develop innovative new ideas that can be used both within Nokia’s own business but also more broadly to drive environmental improvements.   

Photos of the concepts 

Video of the Remade concept

 Press materials and photos from the London event www.nokia.com/press

Nokia has joined IBM, Sony and Pitney Bowes in offering the rights to
environmentally friendly technologies for free.
Called the Eco-Patent Commons, this is a first-of-its-kind effort to
help the environment, making dozens of innovative, environmentally
responsible patents available free of charge.

Nokia has started by donating a patent in an area where there is a lot
of potential to innovate – recycling. The patent outlines how to re-use
the computing power from unwanted mobile phones and transform these
into other electronic items such as data monitoring devices, cameras or
other electronic items that do not have cellular capability.

Further information about the project can be found at World Business
Council for Sustainable Development website at this link
http://www.wbcsd.org/web/epc