38 Vodafone Group Plc Annual Report 2025
Strategic report
Governance
Financials
Other information
Protecting the Planet continued
responsibly recycled instead of being sent to landfill or incineration. Propositions that help our customers improve circularity can also offer a potential commercial opportunity by contributing to customer retention and revenue generation. This strategy is also supported by engagement with suppliers, consumers and enterprise customers to raise awareness of the environmental impacts of electronic waste, and encourage responsible management of mobile and/or CPE devices. We are committed to helping more of our customers bring their used electronic devices back to us. We do so by providing channels and attractive propositions for product take-back and raising awareness to encourage greater participation. This year, we continued our efforts to enable our customers to keep their devices in use for longer by offering services that extend the lifecycle of devices, such as repair, insurance and trade-in. We are developing propositions to give more used devices a chance at a second life through re-use, repair, refurbishment, and resale where it is commercially viable. We have already started to offer these propositions in our markets, embedding them in our commercial strategy growth ambitions. Our second life proposition is available in six markets, trade-in is available in eight markets, and device care insurance is available in eight markets. We also continued to raise awareness of our circularity commitments among our customers. This year, we scaled our global consumer campaign with the World Wildlife Fund (‘WWF’) in markets offering trade-in, donation and recycling programmes for mobile phones, to encourage consumers to return their mobile phones and adopt more circular behaviours. We also raised awareness among enterprise customers through our active engagement in Greentech Festival in Berlin, London and Singapore.
We collaborated with others across our value chain and wider ecosystem to build a more circular economy. This year, we actively engaged in several industry-wide initiatives to accelerate the industry’s transformation towards circularity; we contributed to a circularity working group hosted by the GSMA Climate Change Taskforce, helping to develop industry thought leadership on the business case for circularity. We also continued our active involvement in the EcoRating consortium and assessed the environmental characteristics and performance of 43 new device models this year. We aim to collect 1 million used mobile phone devices for reuse, recycling or donation. This target relates to our campaign to collect ‘1 million phones for the Planet’, which was launched in November 2022 in partnership with the WWF. Since the start of the campaign, we have collected an estimated 700,000 used phones for refurbishment and reuse, recycling or donation to social causes.
Our approach to device circularity comprises six priority areas of action: 1. Trade-in: We encourage consumers to extend the lifetime of their mobile device by trading it in to be refurbished and resold. 2. Refurbished devices: We encourage and enable consumers and enterprise customers to purchase second-hand mobile and CPE devices. 3. Device care: We encourage customers to repair their devices instead of replacing them when faced with damage or technical issues through our after-sales services and our Vodafone Insurance programme. 4. L ong-term financing: We offer financing options for customers, which encourage them to keep their mobile devices for longer, thus helping to extend the device lifecycle. 5. S ustainability by design: We aim to integrate environmental criteria into the product design and development process for our own CPE and TV set-top box devices. 6. Waste management: We encourage customers to return end-of-life mobile and CPE devices, so that they can be responsibly recycled. Additionally, Vodafone Business ran multiple spotlights to encourage enterprise customers to procure handsets, tablets and laptops through the Device Lifecycle Management (‘DLM’) programme, our device as a service option. DLM ensures the redeployment, refurbishment or recycling of devices at the end of contracts, leading to emissions savings of up to approximately 44 kgCO 2 e per phone and 82 kgCO 2 e per tablet by extending devices’ lifetime and avoiding the production of new devices. Furthermore, for each leased device, an equivalent number of scrap devices destined for landfill in Africa are collected and sent for recycling, ensuring minerals go back into the value chain and e-waste is reduced.
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