With the recent rise of the circular economy, where no one wants to have their old electronics handled in a non-environmentally friendly way, huge fines on Facebook and Google for data protection, Companies and corporations out there, including gov’t entities feel a lot of pressure now, because of the visibility and publicity around GDPR in Europe and going on in USA. Plus, China shutdown, it voices a more credible and responsible domestic recycling to be happening. We have an important message to deliver, our business and demand is growing the fastest rate we have ever seen. We are going to try to handle all the opportunities coming our way.
All major Mobile Network Operators say: Do you understand how big 4G to 5G is? Let me give you an example: One item, a router that has a printed circuit board in it, approx. one TRILLION routers in USA alone will have to be recycled responsibly in 5-7 years, because of not compatible with 5G platform, as they are 3G and 4G. And it must be done in an environmentally responsible way. we not going to ship it to India and China or anywhere else like Africa and we are not going to dump it in landfills in America or rivers in Europe and such things. We have never heard such numbers, trillion router and This has nothing to do with all the other electronics, set top boxes, cell phones… that is a massive opportunity for the circular economy.
The trends are clear: data destruction and GDPR, circular economy, 4G to 5G and no waste exporting to third world countries.
So, we spent the last 6 months trying to re-calibrate our business. This was done because the industry has its very selfish way into normal business life. We have been pushing ourselves to come up with a mission and we basically ended up meeting the recycles business. That was the last push, that we ended up with a word, which describes this new era that we would like to enter, and this is Product as a Service.
We basically rewrote our Terms and Conditions, we redesigned our market approach that we are going to take and this whole idea of our not giving up the ownership of the products and keeping it to ourselves. And this was something we were not pushing hard enough on to our clients.
But this is changing, and we say: Hey, you need this phone to use it, but please when you stop using it, give it back to us. And then we give you another opportunity to do this better and this way we can take care of this phone, we can find it a new home, and at the end of its lifetime, we will find its way back to the circular economy, and this way we can take care of ourselves and we can take care of the planet.
This is a huge change for us. We announced it last month to our managers. They liked it a lot, it is easy to mobilize and get people enthusiastic about. But it has not been easy for us to redesign every single aspect of our business, so this would come out at top.
What we want to do, is ideally collect all the used phones that are out there, and we want to make sure that they come back to us. We are also starting an innovative buy back program.
We went out and met with many companies, leaders in their industries and saw the high interest from all sides, necessity for the domestic circular economy.