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Recycle & Do Good for Pride

Mobile phones collected by MobileMuster for recycling in March will make a difference to the lives of LGBTQIA+ youth in Australia. In support of Sydney WorldPride 2023, we will give Minus18 $1 for each phone received in March, with a target of 15,000 phones – that’s up to $15,000 that will go towards Minus18’s important work.

A grassroots organisation and an Australian charity, Minus18 is changing the lives of LGBTQIA+ youth all over Australia. Its three main areas of focus are:

• Events, which provide life-affirming social inclusion, including Queer Formals;
• Education & Advocacy through training and resources to help create an Australia free from discrimination; and
• Youth Empowerment by equipping young people with the skills and opportunities they need to drive change.

Eva Dickson from Minus18 says: “Minus18 are so thrilled that Mobile Muster is supporting LGBTQIA+ inclusion and queer young people for WorldPride. Thanks to MobileMuster’s incredible contribution and your donations, we’re able to continue delivering free life-affirming events such as our flagship Queer Formal events in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, training and resources in schools and workplaces across Australia, and youth empowerment through our Young Leaders program. With over 74,000 queer young people having attended our youth events and programs since 2011, over 53,000 people having attended our workshops since 2015 and 5.3 million people having accessed our free resources since 2015, donations such as Mobile Muster’s are a key part of maximising our impact for queer young people.”

Every dollar makes a difference at Minus18. $20 provides a young person with resources on sexuality and gender identity, $50 sends a LGBTQIA+ teen to a life-affirming Queer Formal for free, and $188 equips one Aussie classroom with LGBTQIA+ education resources.

Jacqueline Ong, Program Lead at MobileMuster, says the program partners with charities throughout the year to raise much-needed funds and to give consumers another incentive to look for unused mobiles that are sitting around at home, that could be put to much better use.

On the partnership with Minus18 Ong commented: “We are excited to direct funds to this wonderful organisation that tackles discrimination in tangible ways and supports LGBTQIA+ youth in Australia. Our March 2023 target is 15,000 phones which equals $15,000 for Minus18!”

An estimated 26 million old phones are not being actively used and research has shown that we tend to keep them ‘just in case’ or as a back-up while we transition to a new phone, and then forget about them. Of these, 5 million mobiles are actually broken and unusable! So, there is plenty of scope to get these devices back into the circular economy, given that MobileMuster can recover over 95% of the components in a mobile phone through recycling.

Recycling a phone and its accessories is simple. You can find the nearest drop-off point by putting in your location here or downloading a mailing label to post your package back for free.

Check out our Recycle & Do Good for Pride page here for further information.