How to promote mobile phone recovery? Evaluation of a collection campaign in Belgian schools

Abstract

Mobile phone recycling is crucial to recover valuable resources and mitigate environmental health risks. Collection campaigns may help to retrieve unused phones, but empirical evidence on the factors contributing to the effectiveness of such campaigns is rare. In the present study, we assessed how one and the same collection campaign was implemented in N = 124 Belgian schools with over 30,000 students and related between-school variations in implementation characteristics to the number of collected phones (8,931 in total). More phones were collected in schools that assigned a higher priority to the collection campaign (r_s = .42) and in schools that reported a higher degree of teacher involvement (r_s = .36). All schools also received collection-contingent rewards and we randomly offered some schools the opportunity to donate this reward, but this manipulation did not lead to significant between-school differences. These results support the effectiveness of the evaluated collection campaign and can inform the design of future efforts to collect unused mobile phones.