What’s in your phone?

Did you know your smartphone contains a wide range of valuable and critical materials—like gold, silver, copper, and palladium?

By recycling phones, these materials can be recovered and reused, reducing the need for new mining and helping protect our planet’s resources.

Since 2012, Closing the Loop has been collecting electronic waste from countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. In these regions, a lack of proper recycling infrastructure often means discarded phones end up in landfills or are burned in unsafe conditions,  risking a secure recovery of critical raw materials, harming both people and the environment.

In 2020, TNO joined forces with Closing the Loop to help close the loop on electronic waste and to recover CRMs. For every new (TNO-procured) work device purchased, a separate scrap phone is collected and responsibly recycled.

Together, we’ve already collected 40,779 scrap phones—the equivalent of 2 tons of electronic waste that will be safely recycled.

Once all the scrap phones have been recycled, we will be able to recover: