Out with the old, in with the ka-ching!

If your cell phone goes kaput, or you just decide it’s time for something better, what do you do with the old one?

CrunchGear recently shared an article on a company called Flipswap that will take your old cell phone off your hands. In exchange, you can choose a cash payment or have the trade-in value donated to charity. (Either way, you're helping to reduce e-waste.)

Palm also has a recycling program for your old gear. Remember that any time you're donating, selling, or recycling your Palm mobile devices, you'll want to do a factory (or “zero out”) reset before turning it over to someone else. This erases all the data on your Palm device to make sure your personal info doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Check out the Palm support site for details.

-Paul Loeffler

Comments

[Bill Barnes]

Hi,

Is there a UK equivalent please and will this include my Lifedrive that is getting very tired? I read the EU had barred the Lifedrive because it couldn't be safely recycled because of dangerous metals?

Finally am I waiting in vain for a replacement for my Lifedrive which, I guess, will carry on until Christmas if I'm kind to it? I really don't want to move to and Ipaq and Windoze ( A Palm tweaked version would be a compromise)after three Palm OS devices in a row.

Love the blog.

[Jon Zilber (Palm, Inc.)]

There's an organization called Envirofone that does something similar in the UK (http://www.envirofone.com/) for phones, and a site called Envocare (http://www.envocare.co.uk/computers.htm) lists a number of UK resources for reuse and recycling of other types of electronics.