Geoffroy Van Humbeek
Founder of aSmartWorld
Holding a master’s degree in economics from Université Libre de Bruxelles, Geoffroy Van Humbeeck had 10 years of international experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Singapore and Myanmar prior launching aSmartWorld. aSmartWorld is collecting, refurbishing and recirculating smartphones and tablets locally, within Europe, with a truly circular and local model. The startup’s missions are to reduce the negative environmental and social impact of the production of new smartphones and to reduce the digital divide in Europe. aSmartWorld’s objectives, through the local integration of its value chain, are to position Europe as a model of resilient society considering with responsibility the whole life cycle of the electronic devices in use as well as to anchor the European smartphone refurbishing and reselling sector in a local, sustainable and resilient perspective. The Covid crisis has unfortunately shown how much our economic system is fragilised by the lack of diversification in the supply chains. Geoffroy strongly believe it is of fundamental strategic importance for the European Union to regain control over these supply chains and to foster the redevelopment on our continent of a resilient economic landscape. In the domain of electronic devices, refurbishing, repairing and reselling activites should naturally play an important part of the European resilience building strategy. However, this sector did unfortunately not avoid the same fragility trap that the manufacturing sector fell into and is greatly relying on far away cheap labor and environmentally costly transportation.
Talk
In the past, most CSR (corporate and social responsibility) actions were philanthropical, like giving money to charities. This has dramatically evolved and CRS is now a strategic domain defining an important part of companies' communication. Nowadays, most organizations want to demonstrate the positive impact they have on their environment, by including in their CSR report tangible actions touching as many domains of the organization as possible. But it is sometimes difficult to find such tangible actions in the IT domain. aSmartWorld brings them a turnkey solution with regards to their smartphones and tablets. By giving their unused smartphones and tablets to ASW, they benefit from a concrete and innovative CSR action, along with a dedicated report on the impact of their action, at no cost. So why is it still so difficult to collect smartphones? Also, ASW has strong values; how can they sometimes impede a faster business development?