What's one possession we all have and all use (way too much) every day? Yep, our phones. There are a lot of those "smart" gadgets out there, and that equals a lot of environmental waste – in fact, 5.3 billion phones are discarded each year. To put that in perspective, if you lined all those little rectangles up, they’d stretch to the moon and back. Which is why it was great to hear, in an announcement at futurist festival SXSW Sydney, that Australia is leading the charge on a ‘World Phone Amnesty’.
The World Phone Amnesty is an initiative led by innovative mobile company Kingfisher. When you get a new phone, you hand in your old phone via this website – we're told they'll even pay you for it (how much they pay depends on your model of phone) – and they will give it a second life.
Why would you do this, instead of just taking it to an e-waste recycler? Because approximately 83 per cent of a phone’s carbon emissions come from manufacturing, shipping and first-year usage. You might not want the phone anymore but someone else who can't afford a brand-new phone might – and keeping a smartphone in use for an extra two years somewhere in the community can reduce its CO2 impact by 43 per cent.
In the market for a new phone? You can also buy a second-hand refurbished phone over here. People who use a second-hand phone singlehandedly save 82 kilograms of raw materials from being extracted from the Earth.
The World Phone Amnesty is starting this month – and, more than just a way to responsibly discard your phone, it's also an initiative that's about calling for circular economy solutions, ending needless waste, and creating actual environmental solutions for Australians who want to do their bit to save the Earth. We like it.