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Are iPhones better the second time around?
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The iPhone 3GS has increased the supply of refurbished models
My friend Tara Sims succumbed to Apple iPhone fever recently, replacing her BlackBerry with an iPhone 3GS. Like any good public spirited citizen, she didn’t just toss her old phone in a drawer somewhere.
“I’m planning to drop off the phone at Whole Foods where they have a bin for depositing old phones,” Tara explained.
Various stores in the upscale supermarket chain accept old cell phones, which are refurbished by an organization called Secure the Call, Whole Foods Market spokeswoman Jennifer Marples explained further. The phones are then given to residents of shelters for women who use the phones for free, but only to make 9-1-1 emergency calls.
Other carriers and nonprofit organizations take old phones and either refurbish them or recycle the materials so the phones don’t end up in the waste stream. But perhaps less well known is that people can sell their phones to a refurbisher.
RapidRepair, a small-device repair company in Kalamazoo, Mich., was deluged with offers to sell their old iPhones or other phones over the weekend the 3GS went on sale June 19.
“We came in Monday morning and we had a thousand, plus messages. It’s been a monstrous response,” said Aaron Vronko, service manager at RapidRepair. Sellers filled out an online application form, which also lists the prices they will be paid for their iPhones, based on the model and the memory capacity.
Prices paid to sellers range from $75 for a 4GB iPhone 2G to $200 for a 16GB iPhone 3G. The phones must be in working order, Vronko said. RapidRepair will e-mail the seller a FedEx shipping label and invite them to send the phone to Kalamazoo. The buyback program is only for iPhones, he added; the company pays cash for broken phones but only for their salvage value.
The refurbished iPhones are unlocked so can be used on any GSM carrier, not just on AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for new iPhones. The used ones can also run on T-Mobile, the only other nationwide GSM network in the U.S., as well as some smaller regional carriers, Vronko explained. Buyers can also get cheaper voice and data plans than on an AT&T new iPhone plan; as little as $40 per month versus $100 or more.
A check of other carriers found various programs for taking back old phones and recycling them or selling them as refurbished devices.
AT&T doesn’t buy back phones, but it does sell as refurbished phones that are returned by customers, said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman in San Francisco. Most of the time, they are phones customers exchanged for another within 30 days of purchase because they didn’t like the model or color, not because they were defective.
The refurbished phones are only sold online, not in AT&T stores. A refurbished iPhone 3G with 8GB memory is available for $79, and a 16GB for $129, but both require a two-year service contract. Given that one can buy a new 8GB iPhone 3G for just $99, the savings by going refurbished are minimal. However, AT&T sells other refurbished brands of cell phones and smartphones with the option of a contract price – sometimes zero -- and a higher “no commitment” price, but not on the iPhone.
“We want to give customers choice and value,” Britton said about its refurbished phone offerings.
Verizon sells “Certified Pre-Owned” phones on its Web site but only offers six models for sale, only two of them smartphones, and all require a two-year contract. AT&T featured 14 models for sale.
Sprint is the only carrier of the ones I checked that pays the customer for returning their old phone, a credit of up to $50 per phone on their service bill, depending on the model phone. But it does not sell refurbished phones. Instead, the phones are used in “Sprint’s customer service and repair, device testing and community loan programs.”
Sprint has what seems to be the most ambitious reuse and recycling plan of the carriers, with a goal of, by 2017, recycling or reusing 90 percent of the phones it sells. The industry average today is just 10 percent.
Every year, 140 million phones are discarded in the U.S., most ending up in landfills or incinerators, Sprint states in an “e-cycling” fact sheet. Nine out of 10 Sprint customers surveyed by the company own as least one, and some up to five, unused old phones sitting in a drawer or buried in some closet.
Like me. I had three old phones, but sold two of them at a yard sale. Who knows where they'll end up. If more people followed Tara’s lead and donated phones to charities or returned them to their carrier, that would be one small thing that’d help the environment.
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