The easiest thing you can do for the planet is probably sitting in your kitchen drawer

In football, holding the ball is a free kick against you. You had the ball, you had options, you didn’t move it, and now the other team gets the advantage. It’s one of the sport’s more honest rules. Possession without action is a decision. Australia is holding the ball on e-waste; right now we’re sitting on a chance most of us don’t realise we have.

There are an estimated 22.87 million unused mobile phones sitting in Australian homes. More than half are already broken, quietly waiting in drawers and cupboards for someone to do something with them. That number stopped me the first time I heard it. Twenty-two million. That’s twenty-two million devices packed with precious metals and resources just waiting to be recovered and put back into play.

World Environment Day fell on 5 June, and this year’s theme was #NowForClimate. Its central idea is that individual action, repeated at scale, is how things actually change.

In footy, the players who shape a game are often not the ones who kick the goals. They’re the ones doing the one percenters: the spoil, the shepherd, the smother, the tackle that forces a turnover nobody watching on TV will remember by Monday. These are the moments that compound. They are the game.

Recycling your old phone is a one percenter for the planet. On its own it feels small. Multiplied across a whole team, it’s how the game is won.

The one percenter only works, though, when everyone on the team commits to it. That’s the part we’re missing. Australia generates around 22 kilograms of e-waste per person each year, nearly three times the global average, making us the fifth largest per capita producer on the planet. By 2030, our national e-waste total is projected to reach 657,000 tonnes, a 30 per cent increase from where we are today. The magic of a one percenter is what happens when the whole team commits to it. Get everyone around it and the result takes care of itself.

So what’s holding us back? Surprisingly, it comes down to data. 41 per cent of Australians say concerns about their personal information stop them.

This is where the handpass matters. In football, the handpass is the option you use when you can’t kick it long yourself: you move the ball to someone in a better position. When you recycle through MobileMuster, that’s precisely what happens. Every device is completely dismantled and data is physically destroyed. Once people know that, the decision to recycle old phones gets a lot easier.The difference every recycled phone makes is bigger than you might think. MobileMuster’s collections prevented 480 tonnes of CO2 emissions last financial year alone. Around 96 per cent of the materials inside a phone, including cobalt, lithium, copper and rare earth metals, can be recovered and returned to use.

Here’s the stat that tells me our e-waste challenge is winnable: Australians who know about MobileMuster are 60 per cent more likely to recycle their next phone than the general population. The infrastructure exists, and the process is safe. People just don’t know that yet. When they find out, they act.

Dropping a phone at any MobileMuster drop-off point takes minutes. However your phone dies, whether it has a smashed screen, been dunked in the toilet or tumbled off the car roof, it can be recycled at no cost, and the cobalt, lithium and copper inside it recovered and reused.

Twenty-two million idle phones is a scoreboard opportunity, and the clock is still ticking. One percenter by one percenter, that’s how we win this one together.

Jude Bolton played 325 games for the Sydney Swans, is a two-time AFL premiership player and is renowned for his tackling. He is an ambassador for MobileMuster, Australia’s free mobile phone recycling program. mobilemuster.com.au