Samsung Electronics Conducts Upcycling and Recycling Campaign in Celebration of Earth Day

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] Samsung Electronics announced on the 21st that it will conduct upcycling and recycling campaigns involving consumers and employees on the 22nd in celebration of 'Earth Day.'

Samsung Electronics will carry out an upcycling campaign that takes used smartphones left unused in drawers, updates their software simply, and repurposes them for new uses, as well as a recycling campaign that collects phones that are no longer usable for recycling.

Samsung Electronics 'Galaxy Upcycling at Home' (Photo by Samsung Electronics)

Recently, Samsung Electronics launched the beta service of 'Galaxy Upcycling at Home,' which allows used Galaxy smartphones to be repurposed as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, in Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom. This service enables users to link their used smartphones with their current smartphones through the 'SmartThings' application, allowing interactive smart home scenarios.

This program uses the smartphone as a sound sensor to detect cries from babies or pets, identifies the type of sound, sends an alert to the user's smartphone, and can replay the recorded sound. It also uses the light sensor to detect when the surrounding environment becomes darker than a preset brightness level, and can turn on or off connected lights or TVs accordingly.

A recycling campaign is also underway. In celebration of 'Earth Day,' Samsung Electronics, together with 12 affiliates, is conducting a waste phone collection campaign targeting employees and consumers at 39 domestic and overseas business sites. The campaign runs from the 19th to the 30th at major domestic business sites and collects phones, chargers, and batteries of all brands regardless of manufacturer.

Employees at Samsung Electronics Suwon Campus (Samsung Digital City) encouraging the collection campaign of used mobile phones (Photo by Samsung Electronics)

Since 2015, Samsung Electronics has been running this program to raise awareness of resource circulation among employees and to focus on collecting waste phones, having collected about 38,000 waste phones for recycling by 2019. The collected phones go through crushing and smelting processes to recover key resources such as gold, silver, and copper, and the proceeds from selling the recovered materials are donated to the Green Umbrella Children’s Foundation to support vulnerable groups.

This year, waste phone collection campaigns targeting consumers will also be operated at global business sites including the United States and Russia. In particular, in the United States, Samsung Electronics provides a service allowing customers to return end-of-life mobile devices through partnerships with specialized IT device repair shops.

Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics will also hold a lights-off event at major business sites nationwide in celebration of 'Earth Day.' On the 22nd, from 8 PM for 10 minutes, 21 buildings across 8 business sites including Suwon, Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek, Gumi, and Gwangju will turn off their lights. Samsung Electronics explained that this corresponds to a lights-off area of about 210,000 pyeong, equivalent to the size of approximately 1,000 soccer fields.