Protivín (22 March 2022) – Readers in the South Bohemian Region recently brought more than 500 old mobile telephones to their favourite libraries. The collection campaign called Leave your Mobile Phone at the Library (Odlož mobil v knihovně) was organised by the Regional Department of the Environment and Agriculture in cooperation with ASEKOL. Ten institutions in the region with more than sixty collection points took part in the campaign. The most successful was the Protivín Town Library which managed to collect 163 telephones.

“Given the circumstances, the number of collected telephones was a pleasant surprise, but the collected amount was not our main goal. We mainly wanted to draw attention to the correct way of collecting and recycling small electrical devices, because a lot of people continue to throw them into the municipal waste mainly due to a lack of information,” said Pavel Peroutka, the Regional Manager at ASEKOL for the South Bohemian Region.

In total, the region managed to collect 514 old mobile telephones during the campaign and they will now be recycled. Thanks to this, a number of raw materials will be returned into circulation and it will not be necessary to remake them or to mine them. “This confirmed our hunch that people often store mobile telephones for many years. According to rough estimates, there are millions of old, broken mobile telephones in Czech households. For example, people brought telephones to the collection points that have not been made for approximately a quarter of a century or models“, added Peroutka.

More information about the project is available at www.odlozmobil.cz.