Waste Compensation
Waste compensation is a business model that has been developed with the aim at encouraging manufacturers to compensate for the downstream social and environmental impacts of their products. Basically, it requires additional financial contributions from the original equipment manufacturer and the user of the new device, which the service company collects. This payment will be used to fund proper collection and recycling where the social and environmental impact of e-waste is currently most severe.
Compensation is usually based on the principle of “buying new devices and funding the collection and proper recycling of old ones.”
Closing the Loop (CTL), a Dutch for-profit social enterprise, is implementing waste compensation. This fee is subsequently used to retrieve and recycle a discarded phone from (mostly) African countries, including Ghana. Upon collection, the phones are shipped to state-of-the-art end-processors in Europe in order to ensure sound recycling and extract materials for further use.
CTL partners with different organisation and agents in multiple regions of Ghana (including Ashanti, Northern and Eastern regions) who serve as suppliers and aggregate phones from a network of informal e-waste collectors.
The waste compensation model draws from the approach of carbon credit systems (offsetting schemes) and allows clients to compensate the negative impacts of buying a new phone by paying a fee to CTL. This fee is subsequently used to
- retrieve discarded phones
- recycle discarded phones
Build up networks
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Partnership with collectors
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Compliant exports
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