Sustainability

Recycling

Performance

Sony Mobile’s objective is to provide easy and convenient recycling options for every consumer. To drive our commitment, we introduced the Global Environmental Warranty. With this, we guarantee that each and every one of our phones brought to our collection points will be recycled in a responsible way.

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 our own collection and recycling, to financing industry-organized or privately run Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and battery recycling compliance systems.

Products collected by us, from various sources, are handled by our recycling partners in a process co-designed by Sony Mobile 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. Additionally we finance collection and recycling of our products through electronic waste recycling systems.

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.

Capturing the exact number of 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 Similarly, refurbishing companies do not publish their collected and processed volumes.