Recycling

Our customers are concerned about the environment.

Many of them describe themselves as ethical consumers and the  environment is repeatedly featured at the top of their priorities.

We have developed a policy for dealing with our impact on the environment and we publish a series of targets each year.

We link our activities to a key community commitment.

Our effort focuses on the safe collection and re-use of our phones and equipment through take-back schemes.

What can I do with my old phone?

We encourage our customers and employees to hand in phones for re-use or recycling, either by depositing them in boxes in our shops and offices or by freepost to: 

'Freepost O2 Recycling' (UK only).

The UK and Irish scheme is called Fonebak® and significantly reduces the waste from old phones that otherwise go to landfill. Measurements linked to the environmental standard ISO 14001 are used to help measure recycling in a verifiable way.

The Fonebak® scheme allows mobile-phone equipment to be collected, refurbished and re-used or recycled, with very little unusable waste. We recommend this service to our major customers as well. Many of them find it helps them to account for their own environmental impacts as well as to support our own.

Fonebak® is the first such scheme to address current legislation and the EU WEEE Directive (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive). The Directive requires mobile phone producers and distributors to be responsible for taking back and recycling old handsets and accessories in an environmentally efficient way, setting targets and requiring proof of delivery.

We are already well placed. Our base station equipment throughout our networks is upgradable and we have a contract in place to ensure our third generation (3G) mobile systems will be processed for re-use and recycling.

Since our handset recycling scheme began in 2002, we have recovered over half a million mobile phones.