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

Abstract

Mobile phones contain valuable minerals. However at the end of their useful life, these minerals are nearly not recovered since most of the mobile phones are stored at home aka hibernated. This is a significant eco-inefficient behavior compared with end-of-life recovery performance of other valuable products such as cars. Accurate hibernation rates per country or region do not exist but are assumed to be more than 40%, making it an interesting waste stream to improve on recovery. This paper presents the results of the hibernation behavior and drivers of mobile phone owners in the Netherlands. Technical and functional obsolescence appears to be the main driver to replace a mobile phone. About 61% of the respondents keep their discarded mobile phone at home mainly to be used as a spare phone. These results confirm recent similar survey results discussed by Marthino et al. (2017) for Portugal, Wilson et al. (2017) for the UK and Wieser et al., 2018 for Austria. Our research showed that the more valuable the discarded mobile phone is assumed to be, the less willingness to recycle mobile phone owners are. Moreover financial incentives are shown to be the best driver to increase recyclability followed by better service to transfer data from the discarded to the new mobile phone. Environmental drivers such as better understanding of the ecological contribution when recycling or exactly knowing what will be done with the recycled discarded mobile phone are the weakest driver to improve recyclability