Our impact in 2022
In 2022, we once again launched a variety of initiatives and campaigns to encourage Belgians to discard or donate their old appliances.
Coffee with Recupel
In 2022, you could deliver an old appliance to Café Recupel in five Belgian cities, in exchange for a drink and a bite to eat. Anyone who couldn’t get there could call on a bicycle courier. This initiative was a hit: we welcomed almost 2,000 visitors, including politicians Elio Di Rupo, Zuhal Demir and Vincent Van Quickenborne, and collected 10 tonnes of old electrical appliances. Broken appliances were repaired in our repair corners, second-hand shops took the appliances that could be re-used and the genuinely faulty ones were recycled.
20 years of Recupel
Looking back on 20 years of Recupel and looking forward to a circular future was the plan for Recupolis in Hal 5, Leuven. Five circular pioneers made for an inspiring evening:
- Pierre-François Bareel on the Biolix project: a cooperation between the University of Liège and Comet to convert scrap copper into new cathodes.
- Michel Simon, about the social and ecological mission of the Liège-based Electro SOFIE.
- Our Swiss colleagues from SENS eRecycling on their project to easily hand over old electrical appliances to the postal service.
- Stefan Goemaere from Saamo on Papillon, a lease formula to combat energy poverty in cooperation with BSH.
- Nick Davids from Maakbaar Leuven on the citizen science project with Recupel to gain a better understanding of what old electrical appliances are lying around in people’s homes, and why.
All of these inspiring tales were collected in a newsletter for Recupel’s 20th anniversary.
Free pick-up service for SMEs and organisations
In 2022, we set up Recupel Pick-up, a free service collecting old (household) electronic devices and electrical appliances from schools, hospitals, businesses and other organisations. With this initiative we filled a gap, because there was not yet a user-friendly system for organisations to get rid of their old appliances and devices. Anyone wishing to use the service can register in a few clicks via recupel.be/pick-up.
Call the police! 200,000 old fridges are missing
Recupel fears that approximately 200,000 fridges are incorrectly recycled every year. A specialist firm has to extract the harmful gases and fluids from old fridges. If that doesn’t happen, it can lead to serious damage to the environment. A wrongly recycled fridge is like a sauna for the planet. We communicated this message by leaving a pop-up sauna at Central Station in Brussels.
E-figures waiting for the bus
According to the latest Recupel survey there are up to 49 million unused electrical appliances gathering dust in the cupboards and drawers of Belgian homes – approximately 10 per household. To encourage people to get these appliances/devices repaired, to give them away or to recycle them, Recupel set up an eye-catching campaign: on one Tuesday morning in October, all sorts of figures made from electrical appliances stood waiting at a bus stop in Leuven to go to a new destination.
Swapping with the postal service
Are you getting a parcel delivered? With Recupel Retour, you can exchange it for a broken mobile phone or an old blender. This is a handy alternative for those who can’t get to a container park or collection point to drop off their own appliances. Recupel Retour is not only accessible, but also climate-conscious because your appliance or device gets a lift with someone who was driving anyway.