Nokia is starting 2009 with a big campaign around generating the need to recycle old handsets. Using multiple marketing tools, company plans to take this cause to end users. Recycle initiatives, named Take Back, is aimed to reduce e-waste and to help reduce environmental impact of Nokia’s widely used cell phone handsets. From Nokia website:

Because we design our products to last and have a global Nokia service network to look after them, they keep working. But a lot of our phones are no longer used. Our global consumer survey reveals that 44% of old mobile phones are lying in drawers at home and not being recycled. Find out from our latest survey why only 3% of people recycle their mobile phones globally. Why should you recycle a phone that’s not being used? Recycling means we don’t need to extract and refine as much material for new products, saving energy, chemicals and waste. If every Nokia user recycled just one unused phone at the end of its life, together we would save nearly 80,000 tonnes of raw materials.

Recycling gives your phone a second life

We work with carefully selected companies who reclaim materials from the phones and accessories we pass on to them. These companies are assessed on a regular basis to make sure they’re doing things properly and that anything handed to them is recycled responsibly.

In India, company is planning to install close to 1300 recycling bins in all Nokia dealers.Though company clarified that it has no intention of going into refurbished product business

Nokia does not carry out refurbishment business as a company, or support any refurbishment carried out by refurbishment companies, at the moment. The reasons are that we have no control over the quality or safety of the phones that are resold after restoration. Furthermore, we would not like to see the third world a place where industrialised world dumps old technology. A more sustainable solution is to utilize the significant advances made in technology in the past decade, and offer products that are optimised for developing markets, where recycling infrastructure is often lacking.

As we head into 2009, which is all set to become year of Green IT, we will expect more such initiatives from high tech manufacturers.