CIRCULAR ECONOMY
Partnerships driving scale Vodafone has made partnerships central to its circularity model. The best-known is its global work with WWF, launched to support a shift towards a more circular economy for mobile phones and to drive the One Million Phones for the Planet Initiative. Vodafone and WWF said in March 2026 that the target had been reached, with the programme helping generate funds for conservation projects as well as collecting phones for refurbishment, recycling or donation. A second important partnership is Vodafone Germany’ s“ One for
One” model with Closing the Loop, where for every new phone sold to private customers in Germany, an old one is collected in Africa for professional recycling back in Europe. That arrangement matters because it links new-device sales to explicit recovery obligations, instead of relying on voluntary consumer returns alone. It also reflects a wider trend in telco sustainability: circularity programmes are increasingly judged by collection rates, recovered material flows and verifiable downstream processing, not just by awareness campaigns.
84 October 2026