Refurbrished Sprint Cell Phones

Sprint Nextel Corp. and RadioShack Corp. are improving their services, by broadening a program through which they will refurbish old cell phones from all handset makers or wireless carriers, each company accepting more than 900 different handsets.

As they said, the program aims at refurbishing more than 64,000 estimated tons of old cell phones from all over the U.S. The costumers are invited to participate in this campaign, choosing to trade their old cell phones, rather than throwing them in the trash bin. If they agree to this plan, customers could turn up to the carrier stores to choose other cell phones and get a credit, corresponding with the value of the phone they brought. Thus, they would benefit from a new cell phone, and the company would further sell the old phones to eRecyclingCorps. The later is free to evaluate the received phones, choosing which of them to refurbish and resell, or which to recycle.

Chief Executive David Edmonson is very optimistic about the plan, and expects to obtain feed-back from many consumers, that would otherwise participate in other programs in which they would give their phones away for free, or wait weeks to be reimbursed after mailing the cell phone. “The trick here is to provide a meaningful incentive to consumers”, said Edmonson, very confident about the program’s results.

The contract between Sprint and eRecyclingCorps was set until 2017, but Edmonson hopes they will reach the target sooner. ERecyclingCorps will handle the 1,100 cell phones that were returned to their stores, in order to have nine phones out of 10 recycled or reused, for every sold phone until the year 2017.

The eRecyclingCorps company announced that only 1 percent of the cell phone users recycle their old devices, out of 4 billion users of mobile phone technology. In U.S., the percentage is 10 % of the many 275 million users. This research has been made by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Asked about his plans, Edmonson believes that he can also convince other companies and people to take part of this project of cell phones recycling soon. He estimated that 20 million to 30 million of the 130 million mobile phones will be included in the program every year, adding that he thinks this is as he calls “a good start”.

As he said, Edmonson believes he contributed a great deal to the development of mobile phone industry while he collaborated with RadioShack, and feels that now is the proper moment to deal with the issue of mobile waste, in order to obtain a balance in selling new products and helping the market’s growth.

Edmonson also stated that 80 to 85 percent of the traded mobile phones are very good ones, and could become a sales target after they will be refurbished, the immediate effect being 35 percent more profit for the company.

There is hope that other countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, and India would join the recycling campaign soon. This would be another success the company would achieve in cleaning the market from mobile phone waste, if the governments of the specified countries will want to participate.