To students’ attention: win a prize collecting used mobile phones

4/26/22

Sustainability Week to feature national collection campaign highlighting the importance of recycling

This year’s Sustainability Week will feature a used battery and mobile phone collection competition for primary school students and educational institutions. The competition increasingly popular from year to year attracted 183 schools from across the country last year. Students collected more than 9,000 mobile phones and e-gadgets and nearly 23,000 kg of batteries for recycling. This year, the competition will take place between 25 April and 25 May 2022.

A smartphone is used for 2 years on average. In many households, unused mobile phones are hidden in drawers instead of being properly recollected. According to the statistics made by Kék Bolygó Foundation, most used mobile phones are hidden in drawers at home, a major portion of them are given as a gift to others and only 20% are returned to collection points, recycling sites, mobile operators or vendors.

Mobile phones contain valuable raw materials including tantalum, gold, palladium, silver, cobalt, copper and iron. Some estimates put the raw material value of 200 kg of handsets to about HUF 630,000. Raw materials are essential also for new handset production, and they can be newly extracted only in a costly and environmentally polluting way. Therefore, it is particularly important to collect used mobile phones so that their components can be appropriately processed and recycled to prevent the unwanted environmental impact.

As part of the Sustainability Week, the Pont Velem Okos Program announced a used battery and mobile phone collection competition supported by the Ministry of Human Resources (EMMI), the Kék Bolygó Foundation, ForeGo and Yettel between 25 April and 25 May 2022.

The students collecting the largest number of mobile phones and batteries will be rewarded with valuable prizes (tablets, smartphones, bluetooth earphones and portable speakers). The educational institutions collecting the most used batteries and mobile phones in each county will get a cash prize of HUF 35,000. The quantity of waste collected by the schools and the students in the given period can be tracked viewing the top list available on the website www.pontvelem.hu.

Yettel has been main sponsor of the competition for years. With respect for the environment being one of its core values, it seeks to prevent or minimise the environmental impact of its operations using innovative environmental solutions.

For more information about the competition please visit the following website: https://www.pontvelem.hu/szelektiv-hulladekgyujtes/gyujtoverseny