Vodafone UK Launch Eco-SIM Cards Made from Recycled Plastic
Mobile operator Vodafone will this month start offering Eco-SIM cards in their half-sized holders to customers across all 12 of their UK and European markets (plus Egypt, Turkey and South Africa), which are made from recycled plastic and will be “progressively replacing” SIM cards that are currently made from new plastic.
The change builds on last year’s move to halve the size of their SIM card holder, which Vodafone claims has helped to reduce the amount of plastic used to provide customers with SIMs by around 340 tonnes a year – equivalent to a reduction of 1,760 tonnes of CO2e.
Vodafone’s introduction of the Eco-SIM should further eliminate the need for 320 tonnes of virgin plastic to be manufactured each year, which they say has the potential to save an additional 1,280 tonnes of CO2e per year. Every little helps.
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Alex Froment-Curtil, Vodafone Group Chief Commercial Officer, said:
“Our ultimate goal is to eliminate the need to supply plastic SIMs entirely. We have already halved the amount of plastic used in our SIM cards, and the introduction of Eco-SIMs made from recycled plastic will further reduce the environmental impact of our activities.”
Going forward, the best approach will be to completely replace physical SIMs with digital eSIMs, but that transition is taking a long time and many people currently still require physical SIMs for their Smartphones.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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If Vodafone also offered esim to pay as you go and MVNOs like Voxi the transition would have been much faster.
The true E-Sim has arrived with questionable savings to the environment, surly the
Embedded SIM is the way to go.
Maybe they don’t want us to have esims because it will make the process of jumping network easier? I mean why have they not figured this out yet.
Having dealt with a Vodafone esim on my watch, I still prefer physical sims.
I had to factory reset my watch at one point because the esim wouldn’t provision.
I also doubt it would make switching that much easier, since you’d still need to port any numbers. What may be a disadvantage is where you can have dual sims, so if e.g. abroad it may be cheaper to use a local network rather than pay Vodafone for roaming.
switching network is already so simple, just takes a day, and most SIM cards a free anyway, I think it’s just billing issues. too many old legacy systems.