“From sores, mold, and mud / I have made beauty and new worth.”
These verses by Tudor Arghezi inspired the event organized by the Environ on September 17, at The Villa, marking International Ozone Layer Day.
The meeting brought together creativity, femininity, and environmental care in a unique workshop designed to illustrate, in a tangible way, how waste can be transformed into resources and beauty.
The event placed a spotlight on the mobile phone — the most widely used electronic device in the world and also one of the products with the highest recycling potential. Each device contains nearly 30 valuable materials and metals, including gold, silver, copper, cobalt, lithium, and palladium.
Today, there are more mobile phones on the planet than people, and producing each new device consumes finite resources with a significant environmental footprint. Meanwhile, more than 5 billion unused mobile phones are lying forgotten in drawers worldwide — kept out of convenience, nostalgia, or simply due to a lack of recycling awareness.
From e-waste to jewelry
During the “From e-waste to jewelry” workshop, twenty participants — journalists and online personalities — were invited to look at these discarded materials from a new perspective.
Under the guidance of Ecaterina Colasîz, founder of KateriniMou, motherboards, circuits, and other components recovered from recycled phones and laptops were turned into unique brooches — elegant accessories carrying a strong environmental message.
“Inspired by Arghezi’s words and by the low recycling rate of mobile phones — only about 5% — we combined art, innovation, and sustainability in an intimate, creative event that showed how what seems like waste can be transformed into beauty and value,” said Roxana Puia, Marketing Director at Environ
For Environ, this event reflects the organization’s vision of how environmental projects should be communicated: by telling the story of sustainability in a creative and memorable way, transforming concepts like recycling and circular economy into inspiring, tangible experiences, not just technical messages or statistics.
The resulting brooches are more than mere accessories — they are symbols of responsibility and of the power to give materials a new life. In a world where one ton of recycled mobile phones can generate 3.3 kilograms of rare metals, every small act of reuse and recycling truly matters.
Ultimately, the beauty of these objects lies not only in their aesthetic appeal, but in the story they tell: that the planet’s resources are finite, yet through creativity and awareness, each of us can contribute to a more sustainable world.
