A couple of weeks ago, I had what my friends called the great iPhone tragedy. Getting out of my car, my iPhone 3G flipped out of my purse and landed facedown on the asphalt. You can guess what it looked like when I flipped it over, leaving shards of glass on the road. So, my iPhone was retired a little earlier than expected. What to do with my broken device?
I briefly considered selling it on BuyMyTronics, a company that I happened to interview the same day as my tragedy. That’s because not only does the site specialize in disposing responsibly of unwanted electronics — notably those with an Apple brand and also various e-readers — it actually will take broken ones, repair them and get them back into circulation.
Brett Mosley, the site’s founder and CEO, has been running the site on his own for about three years now and expects to do a run-rate of about $2 million this year. Its focus isn’t necessarily on recycling, it’s on redeployment which Mosley feels is the greenest way to “recycle” old electronics. Why not get them to people who can give them a second life? BuyMyTronics is a heavy investor in wind power energy credits, which it uses to offset the impact of running its Web site.
Truth be told, there are quite a few places where you can donate your old mobile phone, MP3 player, GPS device and other consumer electronics devices that you might have outgrown or out-used. You can search to see which one might give you the best trade-in deal (either from a pricing or environmental standpoint), but using a super-search engine for electronics recycling programs called EcoSquid.com.
When you visit the site, all you do is type in your product type and zip code, and the search will return all your options, arranged by things like whether or not the service is free, any relevant fees, delivery logistics and so on. For example, when I typed in a search for a Dell notebook, some of my options included making a tax donation through the Christina Foundation, dropping it off as part of the free Dell/Goodwill recycling program or paying a fee to send to one of Dell’s competitors.
The search engine actually is relevant for everything from cables to game consoles to routers. If you use it to search for options for my damaged iPhone, it presents “offers” from companies including ceXchange, Tiger Direct, Gazelle, Radio Shack, Wirefly TradeIns and the aforementioned BuyMyTronics. Believe it or not my broken phone could still fetch close to $100, but I opted to send it to my brother so it can have it repaired and give it a second life.
