September 30, 2010
By Donovan Jackson

Admit it, you’ve probably got tons of electronic junk lurking about in cupboards, office drawers and other little hidey holes around the house. Planning on getting rid of it? You probably should, seeing as those phones from the 1990s are unusable with the dead batteries, the weird keypads and dorky aerials. But, trouble is, getting rid of it should be done in a responsible way. Because electronic equipment is a bit of a minefield of potentially damaging substances to our environment.

At the up-coming Rocking the Daisies enviro-conscious music festival (in Cape Town) and Rocking the Gardens (in Emmarentia), Nokia is getting involved to help you get rid of it while being nice to Planet Earth. Bring your cellphone junk along; put it into the collection points and play your part in making sure that the lifecycle of the once useful old cellphone comes to a happy conclusion.

Just how happy becomes apparent when you consider just how many mobile phones there are in the world: there are over 4 billion people who use them. How many handsets have you had over the years? Probably more than three. Maybe even more than ten. At three, that’s 12 BILLION phones; if just one per person is recycled, it could save 240,000 tons of raw material and reduce gases to the same extent as taking 4 million cars off the roads. And up to 80% of Nokia phones can be recycled, the rest is used to fire the furnaces in the recycling process. Staggering!

So bring your old cellphones or accessories, regardless of make or model, use them to make a few jokes to impress your mates, then put them into the Nokia collection points. You’ll get a leaf, made out of recycled billboard, to add to the Nokia ‘We Recycle’ tree.

More than just collecting and recycling the phones, Nokia is also going to make South Africa a greener place: for every 20 phones or accessories collected, it will plant a tree. You can play your part in not only Rocking the Daisies or the Gardens, but rocking a cleaner, healthier planet. In addition for your recycling efforts you stand in line to win a Nokia N8!

Rocking the Daisies takes place at the Cloof Wine Estate in Darling in the Western Cape from 8-10 October while Rocking the Gardens is at Emmarentia Gardens, Johannesburg, 9-10 October.

Congratulations to Londeka Thanjekwayo who won a Nokia N8 for recycling her e-waste at Rocking the Gardens