Orange targets developing countries with mobile recycling scheme
Friday, July 8, 2011 - 10:58:46
Living in the UK and other Western nations it is extremely easy to recycle old mobile phones, with many firms competing for your custom and attempting to give you the best price. However, in Africa and other developing regions there is a lack of infrastructure to enable such activities, which is something network provider Orange hopes to rectify.
The firm is partnering with local businesses in Burkina Faso, Madagascar and elsewhere, to ensure that people here can enjoy the same mobile recycling facilities as consumers in the UK, reducing the amount of needless waste and putting a bit of cash back in the pockets of phone users.
Orange and Emmaus International will be creating a number of mobile phone recycling facilities over the coming months, with one planned in Niger and exponential expansion on the cards if things go well.
The drive in Burkina Faso has already generated eight tons of old mobile phones, with Orange netting a total of 20 tons from its various sites in Africa. This equates to roughly 130,000 individual portable handsets, according to The Fone Cast.
The mobiles are shipped to France for recycling because while it is easy enough to create large collection facilities, the actual process of breaking down old phones for spares or sprucing them up for resale requires specialist labs, which would be expensive to erect in some of Africa's poorest areas.
Orange has been pushing the message of mobile recycling across the UK and the rest of Europe. In 2010 it recycled around 300,000 mobile phones in France alone, which shows how impressive its activities in Africa have been in a relatively short space of time.
It is good to see various organisations partnering to bring mobile phone recycling to countries which might otherwise be unable to enact it.
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