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Quick. How many old cell phones do you have lying around the house? I must have four or five. Some are stuffed in drawers, while my daughter uses others as toys. The reality is that most phones don’t get recycled. In fact only 3 per cent of mobile phones worldwide get recycled. That’s a lot of landfill and digital waste. It’s also a business opportunity for a company called ecoATM. They have built a nifty kiosk that takes in your old cellphone and gives you money for it.

The ecoATM kiosk has visual recognition technology and other sensors to check the type of phone as well as inspecting it for damage. With over 4,000 phones in its database, the ecoATM matches and inspects your phone, and then determines how much it’s worth (the average payout is about $9 per phone). EcoATM has already recycled over 33,000 handsets and they are deploying their kiosks in malls, electronic store and college campuses across the US.

Look for many more ecoATMs to spring up, since Coinstar has invested an undisclosed amount of money in the company. Coinstar, as you might now, puts out those convenient kiosks that take your spare change, counts it, and converts it to cash and store credit. However, it’s Coinstar’s other kiosk endeavor that has really taken hold. Coinstar is behind Redbox, the popular DVD kiosks that all but doomed Blockbuster and the local DVD rental stores.

To further sweeten the pot, ecoATM is expanding its business model to accept a wide variety of electronics, including video games and iPods. If they get around to selling electronics in their Kiosks, RadioShack better watch out.

Another Green Idea

While on the topic of going green, Stanford University students have come up with a laptop that you can break down into recyclable parts in about 30 seconds. Called the Bloom laptop, it’s designed to take the hassle out of reducing e-waste. Today, the process for recycling computers either does not happen or is pretty inefficient. Aaron Engel-Hall, one of Bloom’s designers, states “They spend 90% of their time prying 250 screws out of every device that comes in the door–it’s very expensive and time-consuming.” With the Bloom laptop,  you just turn a couple of knobs to pop out the parts not easily recycled (e.g., motherboard, battery, mixed materials) and toss the rest into the recycling bin. It even comes with a postage-paid envelope behind the screen to send in the parts you can’t put in your recycling bin.

The Bloom laptop has one other very cool feature that’s very handy while you are still using your computer. Its modular design allows users pop out the keyboard and use it remotely. Why didn’t someone think of that before!

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