FAIRPHONE BV

Their core work

Fairphone BV is a Dutch consumer electronics company that designs and sells modular smartphones built for longevity, repairability, and ethical sourcing. Unlike conventional device makers, their entire commercial model is built around extending product lifecycles — making smartphones that can be disassembled, repaired, and upgraded by end users. In H2020 research, they contributed as an industry partner bringing real-world product design experience and market data to consortia working on circular economy challenges in electronics. Their participation in sustainablySMART focused specifically on remanufacturing workflows, automated disassembly, and sustainable end-of-life management for mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, and digital voice recorders.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 project (2015-2019), Fairphone's involvement was squarely technical: remanufacturing factory processes, sorting and disassembly automation, PCB circularity, and energy efficiency in mobile devices. This maps directly to their core product work — making phones that can actually be taken apart and rebuilt. By 2018-2022, their participation shifted to COUPLED, a project on land-use sustainability and global supply chain telecouplings — a much more systemic, policy-adjacent topic with no recorded technical keywords. This suggests Fairphone was expanding their sustainability narrative beyond the device itself toward upstream supply chain and raw material sourcing, consistent with their public campaigns on conflict minerals and fair mining.

Fairphone appears to be broadening from device-level circular economy toward systemic sustainability — supply chains, land use, and resource governance — which positions them as a credible voice in both electronics circularity and responsible sourcing debates.

How they like to work

Fairphone consistently joins consortia as a participant or third-party contributor rather than leading projects — they bring commercial credibility and real-world product data, not research infrastructure. Their network of 36 partners across 14 countries was built through a single large consortium (sustainablySMART), suggesting they engage deeply within individual projects rather than spreading across many. For potential collaborators, this means Fairphone is a valuable industry anchor that lends legitimacy and market context, but they are unlikely to take on coordination or administrative leadership of a project.

Fairphone built connections with 36 unique partners across 14 countries, almost entirely through the sustainablySMART consortium — a Marie Curie ITN combined with a research action that brought together universities, manufacturers, and technology SMEs focused on mobile device lifecycles. Their network is European in scope but concentrated in a single thematic cluster.

What sets them apart

Fairphone is one of the very few commercial smartphone brands that has embedded circular economy principles into its actual product — not as a research goal, but as a market differentiator. This gives them something almost no other H2020 partner can offer: live commercial evidence that sustainable electronics design works at scale. For consortium builders working on electronics circularity, e-waste, or responsible sourcing, Fairphone provides both technical insight from real device engineering and the reputational weight of a brand that EU institutions and consumers already recognize.

Highlights from their portfolio

• sustainablySMART
  The sole funded project for Fairphone and their most technically aligned participation — directly operationalizing their commercial model of modular, remanufacturable devices within a multi-partner EU research framework on mobile device lifecycle extension.
• COUPLED
  An unusual fit for an electronics SME, this land-use telecoupling project signals Fairphone's ambition to engage with upstream supply chain sustainability beyond device design — reflecting their campaigns on conflict minerals and fair mining.