RHINOSHIELD, a leading brand of protective accessories, is addressing plastic resource management issues with its mono-material.
The impact of plastic waste from 1 billion mobile phone cases each year
How big a threat is posed by a small mobile phone accessory? It is estimated that each year 1.4 billion mobile phones are produced globally, along with at least 1 billion mobile phone cases. The scale of the impact cannot be underestimated.
What is the final fate of mobile phone cases? Most of it is plastic waste that is difficult to recycle. Since most of the mobile phone cases on the market are made of a variety of composite materials, they must be disassembled, debonded, cleaned, and sorted, resulting in a significant increase in processing costs. The quality of the materials also deteriorates during the process, making them difficult to reuse, so they end up being buried or incinerated.
0 waste, mono-material, 100% recyclable
Starting from 2015 with the concepts of plastic product lifecycle management (PLM) and extended producer responsibility (EPR), the materials science research and development team at RHINOSHIELD has aimed at "zero waste" and promoted two major paths to promote circular transformation:
- Mono-material assembly method: RHINOSHIELD has been a leader in the industry since 2017, with a full range of mobile phone cases made of a mono-material. With the mono-material, there is no need for complicated recycling processes—it can be directly broken into pieces and put into recycling. It also meets the needs of production economy, product functionality, and cycle sustainability.
- Circular materials technology: Extends material recycling life by more than 6 times, meaning that products can withstand multiple recycles. Taiwan's first 100% recycled mobile phone case, CircularNext, was launched in 2024, with zero virgin plastic added. It is completely remade using RHINOSHIELD’s own recycled cases and leftover materials from the production process. And a product cycle history is incorporated to facilitate management and traceability.
Benefits
- So far, more than 10 million users around the world support RHINOSHIELD mono-material mobile phone cases.
- Establish more than 100 recycling stations across Taiwan with its distribution partners, also promote mail-in recycling in Europe and North America.
- Built its own full-cycle manufacturing process and launched mass-produced products to prove feasibility, with the aim of driving industrial transformation.