THE ECO ATM FOR UNWANTED CELL PHONES, CONSUMER ELECTRONICS
Update May 18, 2008 How many old, unused, and unusable cell phones do you have in your
house? I have four, including the old "near brick" cell phones. My wife has a couple too. I've
thought about recycling them but for one reason or another I haven't. But now there is a company that will make recycling
easy and convenient and might even put some money in my pocket for doing the right thing. The company is known as eco
ATM and it is now experimenting with several models of an automated device that will accept cell phones and other small electronics
and pay consumers a fee or "cash reward" for recycling. You'll find out about it in our video report below.
What makes this an even better idea is that the stand-alone eco ATM machines can be placed in supermarkets,
and convenience stores, and inside malls, and inside department stores and even in the lobbies of office buildings.
American consumers are already used to this concept because there are regular bank and privately owned ATMs in similar locations.
And the CoinStar company has machines in similar locations that accept coins and converts the coins into paper money or store
credits. I guess you won't be surprised to find out that the CoinStar company is a major investor in the ecoATM Company.
In our video report you will see how the latest model of the eco ATM works. We also got a sneak
peek into what the next generation of the eco ATM machines will be like. We suspect that in the near future the newer
eco ATM machines will also be able to accept old computers as well as other old consumer electronics. What surprised
me was how there is gold and palladium and platinum inside cell phones that can be recycled and recycling phones for
their gold and palladium and platinum instead of mining can be a more efficient way of getting these precious metals,
including mining them.
The ecoATM Company is also making it possible to recycle working
phones that can be someone's low cost phone. And the ecoATM Company can also recycle working parts to make it more efficient
to repair cell phones.
