Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

After four decades of growth, the cellular mobile phone market shows limits to behavior. Although cell phones have typically a short life span, ranging around two years, the components could last much longer. Therefore cell phones are very suited for reuse and recycling. However it is estimated that less than sixteen percent of end-of-life cell phones are currently recovered. A lot of primary materials, which are sometimes difficult to ore, could be saved from oring and a lot of energy could be saved in case successful strategies could be developed for reuse and recycling of end-of-life cell phones. In this paper we demonstrate using system dynamics, that a successful strategy is one that takes the cultural differences into account together with global flows of end-of-life cell phones. A one-size fits all global strategy is less successful.