Recycling

Product take-back and recycling is vital for us - we take responsibility for our own products by offering our own take-back solutions as well as cooperating with the industry. By providing locations and information about recycling, we want to make it easy for everyone to make good choices which will benefit the environment. For information about your closest collection point, please visit www.sonyericsson.com/recycle

How long has that old phone been put aside?

Many people keep their old phones even after they’ve stopped using them and in the end too many phones end up filling desk drawers. That’s far from having a useful life.

We encourage everyone to recycle no longer used phones, since they contain many valuable resources - components and materials. Many of these can be reused directly or in other applications, saving energy and resources, and reducing mining’s effects on the environment. Professional recycling of electronic waste diverts it from landfills or from potentially unsafe treatments in uncontrolled environments.

Start recycling now!

Hand in your old phone today and grow your Green Heart! Visit www.sonyericsson.com/recycle to find your local collection point.

Did you know

• A smartphone generally contains more than 0.01 g of gold. This precious metal will literally go to waste if not recycled.
• One thousand phones would typically contain about as much gold as several tons of gold ore.
• According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) there are about 5 000 000 000 mobile phone subscribers worldwide. As a very rough estimate their phones could contain about 35 tons of gold (with average gold content estimated as 0,007g per phone).

What can be reused?

The phone housing is mostly made of high grade plastic or metal alloys, both of these types of materials can be recycled into various products. Other parts such as displays and cameras, can also be reused in many applications. Precious metals such as gold, silver and copper can be recovered in a smelting process to be reused in electronics or for jewellery.

WEEE

Sony Ericsson participates in many recycling schemes established to fulfill the requirements of the European Union Directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). This Directive places joint responsibility on manufacturers, retailers and end users to divert electrical and electronic waste from landfills and make reuse, recycling or recovery the first choice. WEEE has been in force since August 2005 and Sony Ericsson is fully compliant with national legislations resulting from this directive. Sony Ericsson is a paying subscriber to many WEEE programmes.

Working closely with our recycling partners Sony Ericsson has co-designed a process where everything handled by our partners will be recycled to meet or exceed today’s environmental practices and expectations. To protect the environment and ensure fair working conditions for all recycling staff, we constantly check and ensure that our recycling partners work according to industry, national and our own high standards.

Since autumn 2008, we’ve been setting up collection schemes for the recycling of our used products. Today Sony Ericsson has around 500 collection points in 8 countries, and we are expanding this coverage with, for example, postage paid collection in the U.S.

Visit www.sonyericsson.com/recycle to find your local collection point.

We guarantee that all phones returned to our collection points will be recycled in an environmentally sound way:

• Landfill waste from our recycling process is kept to an absolute minimum
• The vast majority of the material from recycling is used again as recovered parts, secondary raw material or energy.
• Remaining materials will be disposed of in an environmentally conscious manner in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.



Where our collection points are not available locally, we support our consumers by directing them to industry, regional or commercial recycling programmes where available.

Challenges

It is estimated that in developed countries several hundred million phones a year are collected by independent companies to be refurbished and resold, as revenue from selling repaired end-of-life phones is at least ten times the recycling value. While we support the principle of reuse, Sony Ericsson is concerned with the labour conditions and disposal of electronic waste of many of these refurbishing facilities. Additionally, there are indirect costs to Sony Ericsson and its brand due to the poor quality and safety of some of these refurbished products.

Our products - mobile phones including batteries and accessories - are collected and recycled by numerous systems throughout the world. Our participation in these systems varies from managing Sony Ericsson’s collection and recycling, to financing industry-organized or privately run Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and battery recycling compliance systems.

In 2010 we have recycled in our own systems about 1.5 million phones (approximately 3% of the total number of Sony Ericsson phones sold in 2010) and we strive to increase that number in coming years. Additionally we finance collection and recycling of our products through electronic waste recycling systems in 15 countries.

Capturing the exact number of Sony Ericsson phones collected and treated outside of our own recycling program remains complex. For example, most WEEE recycling schemes do not distinguish between different types of collected electronic equipment and do not record or report separate collection figures for mobile phones. Similarly, refurbishing companies do not publish their collected and processed volumes.