Electronics manufacturers produce around 1.5 billion mobile phones annually. E-waste grew 21% between 2015 and 2019 to over 53.6 million tonnes globally. Only 17.4% of that waste is responsibly recycled. The rest ends up in informal dump sites, mostly in low-income countries, where the toxic materials (lead, mercury, cadmium) leach into soil and groundwater and informal workers extract value metals in dangerous conditions.
Closing the Loop, a Dutch company, built a business model that addresses the African end of this problem by making collection economically viable rather than charity-dependent.
The One-for-One Recycling Proposition
Closing the Loop’s model is straightforward: for every phone sold by a company that partners with Closing the Loop, a scrap phone in Africa is collected and properly recycled. The partner company pays for this service as part of their product or supply chain program, which generates the economic signal that makes collection worth doing.
The collected phones contain valuable materials (gold, silver, copper, palladium) that can be recovered through formal recycling and sold to manufacturers producing new electronics. This material recovery partially offsets the cost of collection, making the economics work at volumes that charity-only approaches can’t sustain.
The one-for-one structure is clever marketing, but the underlying logic is more interesting: it creates a direct economic linkage between consumer electronics purchase in wealthy markets and responsible end-of-life management in markets where that management otherwise doesn’t happen. The West generates the demand for electronics; the East and South get stuck with the waste stream. Closing the Loop runs that money backwards.
The African Context
The informal e-waste sector in Africa creates jobs but creates them dangerously. Workers who sort electronics for valuable components typically do so without protective equipment, burning plastics to access metals and handling materials that cause serious long-term health consequences.
Closing the Loop’s collection infrastructure provides an alternative — creating formal collection routes that give workers more dignified and safer working conditions while ensuring recovered materials flow to regulated recyclers rather than informal smelters.
African governments and development organizations have been moving toward circular economy frameworks for electronics, recognizing that responsible collection creates local jobs, protects public health, and reduces the import burden of virgin materials for electronics manufacturing. Closing the Loop’s model aligns with this direction.
The phone you’re holding right now contains materials that were almost certainly mined in conditions that caused harm. Closing the Loop can’t undo that. What it can do is ensure the end-of-life story is different from the beginning-of-life story.
What Businesses Can Do With This
For companies with hardware or electronics in their supply chain (phones, tablets, accessories, electronics retail), partnering with Closing the Loop is a supply chain sustainability move that produces verifiable outcomes.
Unlike most CSR programs that generate reported impact metrics with limited verification, Closing the Loop’s model is auditable: they track collection volumes, recycling destinations, and material recovery rates. This verifiability matters in an environment where greenwashing scrutiny of supply chain claims is increasing.
Companies like Collective Good have also developed models that collect old phones globally, sell them on secondhand markets, and use profits to support charitable causes, demonstrating that the secondary market for old phones has both financial and social value when managed deliberately.
To find out more about Closing the Loop, visit their:
P.S. If your organization issues or manages mobile phones for employees, exploring a take-back program through Closing the Loop or a similar operator is worth doing before those devices enter the informal waste stream at end-of-life.