Environmentally friendly services
We believe that our innovative product solutions and service concepts make sustainable consumption possible, and thus we are passionate about making advances in this area. We are guided here by the vision of a circular economy. Some of the services offered already help extend product lifetime through maintenance and repairs or properly recycle products at the end of their lifecycle.
Repair and maintenance
Repairs are especially important to us. We offer a particularly broad range of services here, as repairs are how the lifespan of products can be significantly extended and the use of valuable resources reduced. Customers can hand in defective appliances or those in need of maintenance depending on the type of product either at the after-sales service desk or at our Smartbars. At the Smartbars, our in-house technicians repair customers’ mobile phones and also offer further services like the application of display protection application. While our customers can take their devices away with them again straight way at the Smartbar, the after-sales service desk coordinates any repairs required with the manufacturers’ workshop or selected repair service providers.
In financial year 2021/22 we repaired almost 3.2 million appliances. Our customers handed in more than 2.6 million of them via after-sales service. The rest of the more than 550,000 appliances are devices (primarily smartphones) that we repaired on the spot and on the same day at the Smartbars. We reduced electronic waste by almost 8,700 tonnes in financial year 2021/22, as the products remained in use instead of being thrown out. That is almost the weight of the Eiffel Tower!
Resale and recycling
MediaMarktSaturn has enabled the trade-in of old cell phones in exchange for a gift card back in 2019. Through this service, MediaMarktSaturn not only made it easier for its customers to trade in old devices quickly and easily but also made an important contribution to environmental protection. In 2022, the trade-in programme was expanded in cooperation with our partner Foxway. The trade-in offering has been expanded to include further product categories such as notebooks, tablets or cameras, and customers can now trade in their devices in a total of 12 countries either in their nearest store or online. Functional devices are refurbished by our cooperation partners for reuse. If the old mobile phone is no longer suitable for further use, it is dismantled professionally, and the valuable raw materials such as gold, copper and cobalt are returned to the recovery cycle. In the 2021/22 reporting period, more than 70,000 devices were purchased across the company’s countries through the trade-in services and either reprocessed or included in a certified recycling process.
Waste equipment disposal and scrapping
Other waste electrical equipment also contains valuable resources that can be recovered and reused in recycling processes. However, they also contain harmful substances that must not be released into the environment under any circumstances. They must be disposed of correctly. For this purpose, our customers can hand in their old electrical appliances at all MediaMarkt and SATURN stores. If they buy a new appliance, we’ll collect the old one free of charge when we deliver the new appliance. Subsequently, we take care of the proper treatment, recycling and disposal of the old appliance in accordance with legal requirements. More information on this service can be found on the MediaMarkt and SATURN websites.
