So-called ‘recycling kiosks’ for personal electronic items, installed by San Diego-based EcoATM, have begun to appear in suburban US malls. The company hopes the new take-back alternative, which accepts devices such as smart phones and tablets, will ‘make electronics recycling as accessible as a grocery shopping trip’.
Mark Bowles, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer for EcoATM, says the difficulty he faced in recycling mobile phones – a frustration he believed he shared with many of the six billion users worldwide – initially led him to develop his plan for the e-scrap kiosks.
‘There is a huge market for used phones and tablets,’ Mr Bowles states. ‘The three reasons I wasn’t recycling was that it wasn’t convenient, it wasn’t incentivised and I was worried about my personal data not getting erased.’
Source: Recycling International