The mobile phone industry does a fantastic job of motivating people, young and old to part with their money on a biannual or annual basis. It’s pretty rare that people hold on to their old phone for very long. There are obviously exceptions to the rule. In fact, I recently just upgraded from the iPhone 4S (pretty good effort!). But there is no doubt that it’s far more common for people to upgrade their phones than to hold onto them. And that’s exactly what phone companies are counting on.
Samsung and Apple are some of the biggest companies on the planet and they don’t get that big without a massive, hungry, customer base. It’s not that they are only selling phones but that’s where we are going to focus our attention for the moment. These companies are fantastic at marketing and pushing you into believing your life will change if only you buy the latest and greatest smartphone, to rule over your life. We hear of so many people that are disappointed after talking to ‘the big guys’ phone support and finding out that the new phone they just got is going to cost almost as much as they paid for it for a screen replacement because they dropped it – if they’ll even replace it at all. Many new phone warranty claims are instantly rejected on the grounds of ‘physical damage’ because customers dropped their phones.
But having a cracked screen on your phone doesn’t need to be a death sentence for your mobile phone (or your wallet). If you’ve made it this far you probably already know that we have repaired tens of thousands of mobile devices over the years and given them a new lease on life. But other than saving money there are some other really good reasons to never chuck your old phone in the bin.
The environmental impact of e-waste
In 2016 44.7 tonnes of e-waste was generated worldwide which is about 6.1 Kg per person. That number is expected to increase to over 52 tonnes globally by 2021. It’s estimated that 76% of e-waste is likely dumped, traded or recycled in other ways but no matter the lack of data, it’s still a massive void to be filled. Only 20% of e-waste is documented as being properly recycled. Yet despite this, over 90% of materials used in mobile devices could be recycled.
The news gets worse; Australia is in the area that generated the most e-waste per person globally at 17.3kg, with only 6% documented as being recycled. There really is no excuse for such a poor result here in Australia. There are specific mobile phone recycling businesses like Mobile Muster and we our selves offer a mobile phone buyback and recycling services as well – just give us a call and we’ll let you know how much your device is worth or we can arrange to have to correctly recycled for you.
Why are some mobile phone easier to repair than others?
You’ve probably heard that in an effort to reduce the size of mobile devices that the designers needed to make choices that means some phones are very hard to repair. In some cases that might be true but there is certainly an undeniable effort to make some devices hard to repair so that if they break you need to purchase a new one. It wasn’t that long ago that mobile phones were designed specifically to have replaceable batteries so that when they started to reach the end of their life, you could just put a new one in.
Many parts of a phone are now so tightly integrated that we have to break specific parts to get to the broken part in the first place. This could mean that if you break the glass outer layer on your phone, we very likely have to replace the entire screen as well.
They also make getting spare parts very difficult for their party companies. Electronic parts are not always very expensive and they would have trouble keeping their big margins on phone repairs if it was easy for companies like us to get the parts readily.
We have worked long and hard at sourcing the best parts for the lowest prices and combined that with experienced technicians so that we can give you the best repairs possible. We back this claim up with an optional lifetime warranty on many of the repairs we offer as well.
