I was watching an ad on TV from one of these companies that pays you to recycle your phone, so I decided to check how much my Nexus 1 would fetch. Envirophone offered me around £125, but digging further, I found called called TopDollarMobile that offered me over £150. I didn’t realise what a vast range of companies there were out there that offer this service.
So, what’s the best way to get a good price? Well, there’s a comparison site called SellMyMobile that lets you get more money for your mobile by pitting the different companies together and providing a comparison of the cash or equivalent value of points that you could get for your phone. Here’s what they offered for my phone:
There’s a £50 difference between the top and bottom cash offers, so I could save that much just by picking the right company to use to recycle my phone.
So, why has this market proved to be so successful? Well, there are multiple reasons why people choose to recycle their phone. First of all most people have an emotional attachment to their phone. They’ve spent money on it, carried it around in the pocket for a couple of years; and find it hard to just throw away something like that away. Recycling it means that someone else can use it, or that it can be used for parts. Then there’s the environmental reason. Sending your phone to a landfill is the worst option for the environment. There are chemicals that can leak and it’s hardly biodegradable. I suppose there’s always the selfish reason; being offered cash for something you’re going to discard is hardly a proposition that many people will turn down.
Have you even recycled a phone?