Acceptance of Mobile Phone Return Programmes for Increased Resource Efficiency by Young People—Experiences from a German Research Project

Abstract: The need of recycling obsolete mobile phones has significantly increased with a rapidly growing worldwide distribution of mobile phones (Geyer, 2010; Hagelüken, 2010). Mobile phones have a high environmental impact throughout the whole value chain; so far, individual use and recycling behaviour do not show any trends towards more sustainable patterns. Most communication measures for sustainability have been unsuccessful – either in reaching different social groups or their duration of changing individual behaviour (Reller et al., 2009; Tanskanen and Butler, 2007). Therefore, this paper analyses people’s acceptance of mobile phone return programmes in the context of transition towards sustainable resource management.