Pieces of Koco: Cell Phone Recycling

My cell phone from Korea wasn't anything close to the flashy superphone one would expect, but I like the story behind it. My first Korean phone died when I dropped it in a gigantic puddle. My second phone wasn't that notable, and strangely enough (for me) I can't even remember what happened to it. I do remember when I got the phone shown above though!

My job in Korea was just about the most ideal situation one could ever ask for. Of course I still complained from time to time, but it was great, particularly for the random perks. One of these perks came at the ten year anniversary of Samsung's sponsorship of the university. They plopped 700 bucks in my account and a brand new 500 dollar pda cell phone on my desk. It had everything, it could do anything. In an iphone-less world it was like discovering sliced bread. The only thing it didn't do: English. I asked my Korean tutor if he could help me sell it. And he did, for 450 bucks! Then I bought my co-worker's old phone, but discovered that I couldn't use it with my phone service, so I sold it to my student who wanted it for her mother, and in the end I got my final Korean phone from the friend of my tutor, who gave it to me for free, so I took them both, and my tutor's girlfriend, out to my favorite vegetarian restaurant. Great fun.

Now I have no use for this phone, or the other old ones I've come across laying around in my house. I wasn't sure if anyone could make use of my Korean phone here in the states; I'm so out of the loop on whether people even activate used phones. I wasn't going to just throw them out, particularly after recently discovering how nasty these rechargeable batteries are. So, I decided to recycle it with T-Mobile per the recommendation of my dear friend Rose. Apparently, "100% of the net proceeds from handset recycling now benefit the charitable efforts of the T-Mobile Huddle Up program." From the info and pictures posted here and there, it looks like they are doing some good stuff for kids and communities. Fabulous.

I do have one complaint/comment regarding this recycling program adventure. From the site, I found a bunch of T-mobile locations near my home, but only the corporate locations accept the used phones for donation. In all of the three locations I visited, including the last one where they finally took my phones after consulting managerial staff, employees were all surprised that T-mobile even had a recycling program. None of them had even heard of it.
Disappointing.