Recycle Your Charger

Partner: Sainsbury's

The Challenge

Research into electrical items showed that this category was among the least recycled and that consumers had very little knowledge of how or where to dispose of most electrical items responsibly.

Phone chargers are a specific problem — whilst a number of companies buy or accept old handsets, many wouldn’t accept individual chargers. Recycling banks that did accept them were often not part of the geography of people’s everyday routines — to visit them involved an additional journey.

There are 20 million unused phone chargers in Britain — that’s 5,000 tons of waste that could be saved from landfill and recycled and used again.

Because of these facts, when we were assessing the thousands of entries into our competition for Sainsbury’s colleagues, asking what action they would ask their customers to do to change the world, we decided to pick Recycle Your Charger as a winner, and develop it into a fully-fledged inititative that would be run across all Sainsbury’s stores.

Statistics

There are 20 million unused chargers in Britain — that’s 5,000 tons of waste that could be saved from landfill and recycled and used again.
Electrical waste contains heavy metals which release toxins into the environment.

The Solution

We developed a brand identity for the initiative that saw chargers as three-legged beasts lurking in homes, behind beds and in the back of drawers, under desks and hidden in boxes.

Via in-store posters, and giant dropboxes we asked customers if there were any phone chargers hiding in their home, encouraging them to hunt them down and hand them over.

Together with Sainsbury’s, we worked with Valpak who collected all the chargers donated and took them to logistics company Wincanton’s waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) recycling facility in Daventry, Northamptonshire, where they were taken apart to allow the plastics and metals to be sent on for reprocessing.

We also created an online hub which had a national totaliser of all the phone chargers collected, plus information on other items users could recycle, and information on where they could recycle their phone chargers after the month-long in-store initiative was over.

The campaign was seen by Sainsbury’s 19 million customers and 150,000 staff.

Impact

30,000 chargers collected
7.5 tonnes of landfill saved

Coverage

Quotes

We’re really excited to see how much of a difference we can make. Only 280,000 chargers are currently recycled each year. By running this campaign, we hope to raise awareness of charger recycling facilities, while at the same time preventing nearly 40 tonnes of waste from going to landfill.

Neil Sachdev, Property Director, Sainsbury’s