Not that long ago, there were dozens of charity mobile phone donation programs vying for attention. When I went looking for them recently, I found that many had disappeared. What happened to them? Here’s what we found out.
Why Phone Recycling Matters
In the world of electronics recycling, mobile phones are a problem. They’re one of the hardest gadgets to get people to recycle. According to the U.S. EPA’s latest figures we’re recycling just 11 percent of our cell phones as compared with around 40 percent of our computers. We need to get the recycling rate up, and as I’m fond of saying, reuse is the highest form of recycling.
One popular method of getting people to turn in their old phones has been to recycle them for charity. Examples include:
- Cell Phones for Soldiers, a nonprofit that collects mobile phone donations and sells to recycling and used phone reseller companies. Proceeds from these sales are used to buy phone calling cards for soldiers and veterans.
- TechSoup has long sent our old phones to the 911 Cell Phone Bank, a nonprofit that provides emergency cell phones and funds to meet the unexpected and urgent needs of law enforcement and disaster victims. They distribute about 1,000 emergency phones a month to those who need them.
- Phones 4 Charity is a nonprofit organization that supports a number of charities including the National Breast Cancer Foundation and the National Wildlife Federation.
- EcoPhones Recycling Fundraiser program provides collection boxes for schools, charities, and churches and buys the collected phones. I like their price list of how much they pay for different phones. Very up-front.
Nonetheless, many charity mobile phone projects have disappeared, including really high-profile projects like CollectiveGood.org and Call To Protect, the charity project by the Wireless Foundation trade association. Why might these projects have disappeared? We discovered that operating a successful charity mobile phone donation program is complex and difficult.
Just How Much Is Your Old Phone Worth?
James Mosieur, who runs 911 Cell Phone Bank, noted that donated phones usually aren't top-of-the-line (or even previous generation) technology.
As Mosieur told me: "The average person may have 5 or 6 phones they are not using but they don’t always choose the most recently retired device as a donation. They typically go into the garage and grab the oldest dinosaurs they have."
So how much is that old phone really worth? Not that much, according to Mosieur:
- 75 – 80% of devices have no or very little re-marketable value, or are broken or otherwise useless. These devices have a minimal value as scrap ($0 – $5 per pound).
- 15 – 20% have some re-marketable value to an end user ($5 – 15/device).
- 5 – 10% have a sales value higher than $25, of which less than 1 percent are the high-value $300 device.
People donating mobile phones may also have an unrealistic sense of the value of their old phones. Mosieur told me this story as an example: "Recently I received a letter inside a package of donated phones claiming the devices were worth upwards of $200 when in actuality they were so old that they were not even useful as an emergency phone."
What Happened to Charitable Phone Recycling?
Mosieur also put things into perspective for me on what it takes to run a cell phone charitable donation program.
Here's his insight:
"Like anything, the cell phone donation/recycling model is driven by economics. For a program to work, a certain percentage of the donated/recycled devices need to have re-marketable value to help the organization (for profit or nonprofit) pay their bills. Most nonprofit organizations that collect cell phones as a fund raiser do not process the devices themselves. They partner with a for-profit company that actually handles the entire process — from shipping to processing to the ultimate disposal of the devices. This puts them lower on what I call 'the value chain' — the lower you are the less 'value' or money is available. Since there are many hard costs like shipping, labor, etc, and you never know what models you will receive, the for-profit organizations that handle the processing and disposal of devices must make sure that they build in enough of a buffer to ensure profitability."
There it is, the inside scoop on how charity cell phone donations really work, and a possible clue to why there are less and less of them.
Silver Lining?
The shakeout in charity mobile phone donating programs might actually be a healthy trend for the environment. It was a crowded field a few years ago, but with the demise of prominent programs like CollectiveGood.org and Call To Protect, it is a leaner social enterprise.
While the charitable donation part of the field has fewer programs, the commercial part of the industry has grown. There are lots of new online used phone retailers like Swappa, Usell.com, and of course Amazon.com used cell phones, and a healthy market for them on eBay and Craigslist. All the major mobile carriers now offer used phones online as well. With so many phones being retired at one to two years of age, the most active area seems to be trade-in, just like the car market. Used cell phone collection has gone commercial.
As James Mosieur notes, awareness is a barrier to increased collection. As he says:
"Consumers may have some awareness that they can donate or recycle or sell their old devices, but often they become aware at an inopportune time. They read a news story just before running out the door to work, they hear about it on the radio during their commute, they see a news story when they are relaxing after a hard day at work. The fact is that even with all the programs available, the donation/recycling/resale rate is only about 11 percent and holding steady year over year."
Perhaps the silver lining for the environment is that people may be more willing to trade in their phones, especially with the added motivation of being able to trade up to a newer phone.
These commercial mobile phone trade-in programs don't have a charitable elements. They simply cater to people with relatively new phones they want to swap out for yet newer phones.
- T-Mobile Cell Phone Trade-In Program
- AT&T Trade-in Program
- Verizon Wireless Trade-In Program
- Amazon Electronics Trade-In Store
- Walmart Gadgets To Gift Card Program
- Best Buy Trade-In Program
- Target Electronics Trade-In Program
- uSell.com Cell Phone Trade In for Cash Program
- Gazelle: Sell Your Cell Phone and Electronics Trade In
- NextWorth: Cash for phones and tablets
- Phoneraiser.com
For more information, I recommend the Consumer Reports piece, What you need to know about electronics trade-in programs
"Commercial Charity" Programs
There are two prominent hybrid programs in which the major cell phone carriers are providing donated phones to charities. This is a different model than more purely noncommercial programs like Cell Phones for Soldiers and 911 Cell Phone Bank.
The Verizon Hopeline Program is a significant "commercial charity" program that provides refurbished phones to domestic violence agencies. The phones are equipped with 3,000 anytime minutes of airtime and texting capabilities.
The Oklahoma City–based cell phone recycling company, Pace Butler has experimented with multiple phone donation for charity programs over the years. Now they have just one. Their Used Cell Phone Buyback Program donates education books, actually self-help motivational books like How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, to schools and charities. If you have need of such things click here to request books for your organization.
The thing I most like about that company is the Pace Butler Cell Phone Data Erase Tool that hosts online information on how to erase your data on several different phones before you recycle them.
I couldn't get a good sense of how successful these commercial charity programs are, but they are look pretty robust. What’s next after this? It just may be eco ATM vending machines that GigaOm is talking about.
