The wrap: EnviroFone

If you've been to an ENOC petrol station or a Carrefour in Dubai over the past couple of weeks, you're likely to have noticed a big grey drop box encouraging you to recycle your old mobile phones. It's all part of the latest initiative organised by the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) and local company EnviroFone to help the nation become greener. According to EnviroFone managing director Stuart Fleming, it's all about the safe disposal of so-called e-waste. ‘Mobile phones contain a lot of contaminated and very harmful toxins,' says Fleming. ‘They contain beryllium, cadmium, lithium, mercury, silver, and there's even a little bit of gold in there. And of course there's the plastic.'

Finding a safe way to dispose of this kind of e-waste is becoming paramount as the number of mobile phone users continues to rise, and paying to repair broken electronic items has become so much more expensive than replacing them with a newer version. As a direct result, these potentially hazardous objects get thrown in the bin and ultimately end up as landfill. ‘If this happens,' says Fleming, ‘water seeps through the landfill, and the noxious chemicals end up in our water systems, which means that we could effectively be drinking those types of toxins - the process of using chlorine and cleaning out the water just doesn't remove all those harmful contaminants. Alarmingly, one mobile phone battery can pollute 600,000 litres of drinking water.'

But surely in a city where the basic recycling of paper, plastic and glass is still taking a while to catch on, a new initiative to collect and reprocess mobile telephones seems a little optimistic? Not so, it seems, as Fleming and his team have obviously thought this through. ‘Every time you drop off your mobile phone, you can get a reward,' he says. ‘It's the first time that a UAE waste collection process has been incentivised.' When you drop off your mobile phone, you'll be given an envelope. All you need to do is fill it out, put your phone inside and pop it in the box. In return you get a coupon, which entitles you to a number of rewards, including credit on your Etisalat or Du phone account, a discount on foreign currency fund transfers, or a discount on furniture purchases at Japan Home Centre. In addition, every month your name will go into a prize draw to win two economy class tickets to London with Virgin Atlantic, or up to 500,000 air miles with Blue Airmiles. You'll also be helping others, as EnviroFone has pledged to donate Dhs5 to charity Gulf For Good for every phone handed in.

The EnviroFone team has also done their best to make sure that their collection boxes are plentiful and easy to identify, as a criticism of other recycling programmes is that the repositories have been so difficult to locate. There are 270 boxes across the UAE. You can find them in ADNOC and ENOC garages, Du and Etisalat offices, and at Carrefour, Spinneys and inside some shopping centres. Since the initiative started on June 20, around 6,000 phones have been collected, and Fleming was hoping to reach the 10,000 mark by late next week. ‘We are hoping to collect the three million phones we think are out there, just sitting in a drawer at home, not being used'.

The only concern that has been voiced so far is to do with data security. Fleming does his best to allay these fears. ‘We're an environmental company that is audited by the government,' he says. ‘All that we do is collect the phones, split them between the batteries and the handset, put them in a container and send them to a company in Singapore that specialises in recycling this type of equipment. They turn the plastic in your phone into a road cone or into a bumper for a new car. Basically the phone gets pulled apart, and whatever needs to be destroyed is destroyed, and whatever can be reused is reused. Ninety odd per cent of a phone is recyclable.'

What about other all the other types of e-waste like laptops, iPods, PDAs, etc? ‘We began with mobile phones because they are very easy to handle,' Fleming replies. ‘It's a good place to start to get the mindset to change in the UAE regarding the environment and recycling. There's a lot of work to be done, and the best place to start was with something that everybody knows, and everybody uses, and we will be embarking on laptops, PDAs, and computers and things like that in the very near future. Here, our environmental footprint is by far the worst in the world, but we are catching up. There was something in the papers recently about the taxis and the abras going green. So, things are changing, things are moving forward.'

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