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. 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.

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.

Is your unused phone cluttering up your desk drawer? If you no longer need your mobile device, then bring it back to us for recycling and we can put it to good use - 100 percent of the materials in your phone can be recovered and used to make new products or generate energy.

200 phones would make one golden ring.

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.

To help make it easy for you to take your phone back for recycling, we’re investing millions in our network of recycling points – we have close to 5,000 in Nokia Care points, throughout 85 countries and participate in industrial and public take back and recycling programs in all 27 EU countires, Australia and China. And we’re spreading the word about recycling, investing in take-back schemes to encourage everyone to do a little bit and bring their phones back for recycling so that, together, we can make a big difference.

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 3-5 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 industrialized 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 optimized for developing markets, where recycling infrastructure is often lacking.

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

What we’re doing this year

Close to 5,000 Nokia Care points across 85 countries already accept unused mobile phones, accessories and batteries and pass these on to Nokia recycling partners. They also play a major informative role, raising awareness of what recycling a mobile phone means and how easy it is for people to hand back their unused phones for recycling. We also participate in number of collective schemes for take back of electronics waste products in Europe.

Soon the Care points also be part of our global recycling awareness drive. Our we:recycle drive aims to teach both our service network and consumers why responsible recycling is important. As part of we:recycle, we’ll provide additional training to all Nokia Care staff so they can become recycling experts.

What we’ve done previously

This isn’t our first recycling push. We’ve carried out several campaigns to raise recycling awareness and we continue to explore which methods have the biggest impact. In 2007 we ran major awareness campaigns in various markets:

China
Nokia recycled over 55 tonnes of materials from unused electronics. We also continued to be part of the Green Box scheme alongside other manufacturers and China Mobile.

In 2006 around 500 Nokia Care points started to collect phones, with China Mobile offering prepaid cards as an incentive to recycle. The scheme collected over 80 tonnes of materials. We’ve now extended it to cover 11 Nokia suppliers in China.

Finland
We distributed 200,000 return envelopes at the end of 2006, offering a donation of €2 to WWF for each phone returned. The campaign achieved a return rate of more than 11%, with around 25,000 devices collected during the campaign. We’ve now extended this campaign into 13 different retail companies - over 600 shops - in the whole of Finland. You can read more at www.nokia.fi/kierratys.

North America
We ran campaigns involving our employees and the community to celebrate America Recycles Day on 15 November 2007. In New York City we invited people to recycle their used handsets through our Flagship Store and set up a toll-free number for them to request a postage-paid recycle bag.

The community collection events produced over 16 tonnes of obsolete electronic materials for recycling, including over 7,000 phones. Additional events on Earth Day resulted in over 50 tonnes of materials being recycled.

We’ve found that including a return envelope in the box with a new device is not effective. When we tested this in the US we achieved a return rate of less than 2 percent. We now offer downloadable postage-paid return labels instead.

Chile and Peru
We collected phones in an agreement with Movistar. In total, over three tonnes of materials have been collected.

Philippines
We took part in a national pilot project to collect obsolete mobile phones.

Malaysia
We kicked off a recycling campaign in cooperation with a local retailer, giving consumers a 20 percent discount voucher to buy enhancements or batteries in exchange for returned mobile devices. This helped us to collect 3,000 mobile phones.

Europe
Through WEEE collection schemes in the EU in 2007 Nokia contributed through producer associations to the management and recycling of 17,000 tonnes of electronics waste in total.

Of course, these are just a few of the campaigns we’ve run to encourage recycling. We will continue to run recycling awareness campaigns to explore which incentives work in which markets. We will also continue to build collection infrastructure for e-waste in several markets, including the European Union and Australia.

In addition, we also continue recycling of electronic waste coming from our own operations. This includes production scrap, invalid or obsolete components and mobile devices from Nokia employees, as well as old IT equipment.

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 optimized product desing enabling easier recycling would become commonplace, bringing further benefits for consumers, producers and the environment.

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.