Hey this is so cool! We've heard of ever increasing amounts of e-waste being dumped in landfills every passing second, but what's being done to stop or at least decrease the impact of it, no one knows yet! I found this site during my casual internet browsing, and thought how much we need this to be run in an organized way in India as well with over 1,46,000 tones of e-waste being produced every year (source: http://www.e-waste.in/weee_basics/weee_statistics/)
Flipswap.com (based out of the USA) is a free service that helps you first value your cell phone via their website and then pays once you recycle cell phone. So you basically determine the real-time value of your used cell phone on the flpswap.com site, provide your contact information, print out the FREE shipping label, prepare the package (paste the shipping label that allows you to ship it out for free) and that's it. A couple of weeks later you get paid for the little effort (but big contribution to the environment :)) you just made!
Flipswap claims that they are able to re-purpose nearly all of the millions of mobile phones received each year. For some of those phones which can not be reused and must be recycled, Flipswap pledges to plant a tree for every phone that is recycled through their inStore service.
Flipswap estimates that about 25,000 trees were planted through this reLeaf initiative in 2008. More trees mean cleaner air to breathe, less carbon dioxide to heat things up and cleaner water for drinking and washing your hybrid car.
So what happens to the millions of cell phones that get collected at Flipswap? With a larger part of the eWaste that is filling the landfills made up of fully functional phones, Flipswap makes sure that the mobile phones can live out their full functional lives. When you trade in a cell phone with Flipswap, all the data is wiped off, the phone is polished and then put back into the hands of someone who really needs a phone. Now that's a no waste solution that you can truly feel good about.
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