Where Does Your Recycled Phone Really Go?

Reduce, reuse, recycle. I was taught about these three R’s of environmental responsibility from a very young age. What wasn’t drilled into my head quite as fervently was the fact that the three R’s are not on equal footing. It’s far too easy to fall into the mental trap of “out of sight, out of mind.” Just because you toss that aluminum soup can in the blue bin doesn’t mean its environmental impact has been completely nullified. And this becomes even more profound with more complex products, like consumer electronics.

Now, let’s just be perfectly clear. It is always better for you to recycle something than it is for you to toss it in the trash. As a society, we generate way too much garbage and those landfills are wreaking all sorts of havoc on our environment. This is substantially compounded by all the chemicals that can leach into the earth from e-waste.

However, even recycling your old tech gear can be problematic. According to Scientific American, “recycling companies are struggling with higher processing costs, due in part to newer, larger recycling bins that don’t require user sorting and thus become increasingly contaminated with garbage.” While this cross-contamination is less of an issue with dedicated electronics recycling, there are related problems that companies face.

Do you know what happens with a recycled phone? When you send in your old smartphone for recycling, it is usually stripped and taken apart for its various components. I’m not talking about salvaging the screen or the Wi-Fi chip. It goes much further than that, as recyclers work to extract precious metals like silver, palladium, platinum and copper. They also try to get at the plastic and glass, and they do what they can to recycle the battery too.

But that can be remarkably labor and resource-intensive, as they need to have the proper facilities to process these raw materials. And while those materials can then be reused in other products, that just goes right back into the manufacturing process with its considerable environmental impact too. It’s better than the landfill, to be sure, but it’s still hardly ideal.

Which brings me all the way back to the beginning: reducing and reusing are vastly superior to recycling. There’s a good chance that your late model phone is still perfectly functional. Maybe all it needs is a memory wipe, a clean install, and a fresh battery. Maybe even less. And then someone who needs a new phone, but doesn’t need one that’s brand new, can give that “recycled phone” at least a couple more years of usable life.

“Demand for our phones has grown every year,” says Alex Sebastian of Orchard, a company that specializes in breathing new life into lightly used smartphones. “As the pace of innovation in smartphones slows, more and more people are coming to view a high-quality used smartphone as a viable alternative to a new phone.”

From the perspective of 2019, a Pixel 2 XL or a Galaxy S8+ is still a very premium product. Plenty of people would be very happy to use one, especially at a significantly discounted price. With a service like that offered by Orchard, it truly is a win-win situation all around.

The person selling their old phone gets the environmental peace of mind of saving a perfectly useful device from the landfill, while simultaneously recouping some of the original cost. This is way better than letting the used smartphone go unused and forgotten at the bottom of some desk drawer. And the person looking for a new (to them) smartphone can enjoy a remarkably economical choice for a late model device.

As much as we may be led to think otherwise, we don’t actually need the newest and shiniest smartphone around. But even if you feel so inclined, wouldn’t you feel much better (and several dollars richer) knowing that your high quality used phone is actually being used than contributing to the growing e-waste problem?

Promotional consideration for this post was provided by Orchard.