Ministry of Climate, Environment and Energy to introduce home-pickup service in partnership with Korea Post by year's end
South Korea's Ministry of Climate, Environment and Energy will run a nationwide campaign — "Come Back, Phones in the Drawer!" — throughout September to encourage residents to turn in unused mobile phones for recycling, timed to coincide with Resource Circulation Day on Tuesday.
Used phones are already collected and recycled under the country's extended producer responsibility regime, but many households hold on to old handsets for years due to concerns about personal data leaks, a lack of information on disposal methods, and the general inconvenience of doing so.
Improper disposal — such as tossing phones into standard waste bags — also poses a fire hazard because of the lithium-ion batteries inside, making it all the more important to expand a collection system that residents can use safely and easily.
The ministry and the Korea Electronics Recycling Cooperative, known as E-Circular Governance, currently operate a phone-donation program called "Nanum Phone," through which residents can hand in old devices and receive a donation receipt and carbon-neutrality points in return.
During the campaign, 3,000 participants who donate a phone through the Nanum Phone program will be selected by lottery to receive coffee coupons.
Community service centers and schools that wish to join the campaign will be provided with dedicated collection bins. Community service centers plan to keep the bins in place after the campaign ends, building a permanent collection network.
Alongside this, the ministry will introduce a "safe home-pickup service" with Korea Post, allowing residents to have their old phones collected at their doorstep conveniently and securely.
To that end, the ministry, Korea Post and E-Circular Governance signed a related MOU in writing Tuesday and plan to launch a service this year that lets users request a postal home-pickup directly from the Nanum Phone registration screen.
To donate a phone, residents register on the Nanum Phone website, package the device and leave it outside their front door; a Korea Post employee then picks it up and delivers it to a designated recycling facility.
At the facility, batteries are removed first to prevent fire risk, after which the phones go through shredding, crushing and smelting processes to recover valuable metals and other materials for reuse as recycled raw materials. Any personal data stored on the devices is destroyed in the process.
"The small act of safely disposing of an unused phone sitting in a drawer is the starting point of resource circulation — giving precious materials a second life," said Kim Go-eung, director general of the ministry's Resource Circulation Bureau. "We ask for the public's strong interest and participation in this campaign, which we are launching on the occasion of Resource Circulation Day."
thlee@heraldcorp.com
