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If you’re anywhere close to average, you have two, three, maybe four abandoned smartphones in your home, either battered beyond worthwhile repair or relics from two or three phones ago. Why not let a slightly tacky looking, soon to be ubiquitous Gazelle kiosk save them from landfill?
The machines belong to San Diego-based trade-in company ecoATM, and the idea is to take all the hassle out of selling the devices you used to clutch all day and take to bed at night but have since fallen out of love with. If your phone won’t turn on, Gazelle can still come up with a little cash for your scrap metal. And if you’re worried about who could potentially access your photos and messages, ecoATM vows to wipe your personal data for you as part of the process.
After a small, successful trial of “a few kiosks” in 2015, ecoATM’s CEO Dave Maquera says it currently has units inside both Westfield centres in London, as well as shopping centres and Morrisons stores scattered around the UK. That’s a total of 18 kiosks in the UK so far versus the 3,500 kiosks it operates in the US where it has resold or recycled 20 million smartphones to date. Maquera is in town because ecoATM is expanding and he intends to have “a couple of hundred kiosks” live in the UK by the end of 2019. “Our plans are to complete coverage of the UK in its first phase by the end of 2020, which would be well over 1,000 kiosks,” says Maquera.
The location model is actually based on Coinstar, the company behind those machines that give you change for notes that you see in stations and shops, and a “former sister company” of ecoATM. “We would mirror their footprint, to be virtually ubiquitous, so in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, high-street malls,” he says. “We want to be as convenient as that, at least.”
By making everything as simple and convenient as possible, ecoATM also aims to be an increasingly global player in the fight against e-waste. In 2015, the think tank Green Alliance estimated that between 28 and 125 million smartphones are currently lying unused in UK households. Even worse, the average Brit produced 24.9kg of electronic waste per year in 2017, according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor, and between 12 and 30 per cent of that is typically sent to landfill.
The UK was also recently awarded the title of the biggest illegal exporter of e-waste to developing countries in the EU, based on a recent investigation by the Basel Action Network. Smartphones, in particular, contain elements and metals such as aluminium, gold, lithium, mercury, barium and lead which, via decomposition from landfill, can contaminate drinking water and damage natural ecosystems.
We were given a quick demo of how Gazelle works and it’s all very self-explanatory and idiotproof. It’s the type of transaction that older, non-techy demographics will be able to manage which is a crucial factor considering how easy is is for the digitally literate to sell smartphones online. In fact, one advantage is that this system works even if you don’t know exactly what phone you’re looking to sell. You need a UK or EU driving license with you and users must permit Gazelle to scan this and take a profile photo in order to use the service. Right now it won’t accept any other forms of ID. It’s signed up to CheckMEND’s device check which tracks whether the phone has been reported lost/stolen or has been blocked by major networks.
Users will also need to make sure they’ve removed the SIM card and backed up any data before they begin. You can change your mind, even when the phone is inside the kiosk, right up until you enter your bank details for bank transfer or PayPal payment. A mechanical door opens, with the correct charging cable for your device, then closes. From what Maquera describes, robotic arms then manipulate the device, turning it around so that via a series of lights and cameras, it can detect and record the model of the phone as well as evaluate the extent of any cosmetic damage. Maquera says it is also using AI to speed up the cross referencing with a database of tens of millions of images of smartphones with “constantly refreshing intelligence” on pricing.
The user gets an email receipt and the money should show up within 24 hours, but it could be as fast as a few minutes. Maquera says the team has got the process down from “ten to 15 minutes” in 2015 to “five to eight minutes” now. Prices are "competitive" with resale sites so a Samsung Galaxy S8+, in good condition, is likely to be worth around £220 whereas an ancient, broken Nokia might fetch less than £10. You can, of course, get a Gazelle quote then compare it to rival online services such as Music Magpie, which has expanded from CDs and DVDs into phone resale. No doubt a good chunk of its business will be from people who are looking to get rid of their old phone for the least effort possible, including the barrier of packing and posting.
So what happens once the user has walked away? ecoATM collects devices from each kiosk once a week, or as needed, and sends them to a processing center, which is where data is wiped. As with any company privy to our valuable data, users will have to take it at its word on this. (Currently ecoATM doesn’t have a processing center in the UK but it plans to open one.) Then, depending on the condition of the phone, it is sent to wholesaler and refurbisher partners or “responsible recyclers” that ecoATM audits on a regular basis. The guarantee is to never send devices to landfill, though considering that only the metal from lithium-ion batteries can actually be recycled this can't possibly extend to all the elements within the phones.
In the US, ecoATM also runs its own online phone store, though it’s yet to be determined whether it will replicate this in the UK. As a marker of its shift towards reuse and resale, Maquera says that three years ago ecoATM was recycling “above 30 per cent” of the smartphones it processed and that figure has now dropped to around 10 per cent.
As for where the resold phones end up, the service sees high demand from distributors serving people in Asia, Latin America and Africa who are interested in, say, an iPhone 6 but can’t afford Apple prices. That said, Maquera also points out that, based on its US business since 2008 and the small scale trials in the UK, “a lot of the mobile phones end up staying within the country.”
Making a quick buck shouldn’t necessarily always be your first port of call, though, when screens get smashed. The Restart Project prioritises repairs of personal tech products (and furniture and bikes and clothes), actively campaigning for the ‘right to repair’ across the UK and Europe with initiatives such as last October’s Manchester Declaration.
“People often find it unnecessarily hard to extend the lifespan of their existing smartphones,” says Ugo Vallauri, business development lead for The Restart Project, “as manufacturers often don't make parts available including replacement batteries, while designing devices that are difficult, and therefore expensive, to be taken apart in case of a repair.” He sees independent repairers as playing a key role but notes that they often don’t have access to all the parts and tools needed for their work. “We're also increasingly concerned with the lack of software updates and security updates in the Android ecosystem, contributing to reducing the life of devices.”
Gazelle kiosks will only accept smartphones for the time being, but Maquera says that other device types will be added down the line, including tablets: “We’re also going to do wearables. We’ve done a lot of work with the Apple Watch.” Also in sight are expansion plans into Germany and France where ecoATM’s CEO believes the governments are more proactive on recycling in general than the UK.
The same can’t be said for the public, though, as its early 2015 trials showed “higher customer receptivity” in the UK than the US. This was put down to three things: British users having more of an awareness of the value of their phones, feeling comfortable with automated services and environmental responsibility. “I wish I could say it was different in the US,” says Maquera, “but people are just not as environmentally conscious, compared to the UK.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
