A Way For Technology Early Adopters to Go Green and Make Some Money
You’ve had to be living under a rock or not have a soul if the past few years if you haven’t been trying to become “greener.” Greener food, greener driving, greener electronics have all become part of my life in recent times, but at the end of the day I’m a tech geek. I love my toys and with each and every new gadget I get there is that much more junk that ends up in the landfills. Multiply that by the 100,000s and if not millions of other early adopters we make for a lot of non recyclable garbage. The components in today’s electronics not only have a half life long than most can calculate, but are also poisoning water and food supplies if then end up at a landfill close to a source.
There is now a service to help technology early adopters be a littler greener. Gazelle.com has stepped into be a reCommerce service that helps you sell and recycle your used electronics. They’ll pay you for your slightly used laptops, phones, cameras, and pretty much anything that’s electronic. They even pay for shipping the device to them. Then they resell the products on eBay, Amazon, refurbished and sell in bulk, or properly recycled depending on the devices, condition, and demand. Even if the product is valueless or not working they promote you sending it in with other items and they’ll recycle it at no cost.
It’s really great if you think about it, less than 1% of all electronics survive beyond their first user and many times there is technology that as an early adapter you wouldn’t be caught dead using or claiming ownership to 2 years, 1 year, 9 months, maybe even less after buying. So much of that is cutting edge tech or more than a non techie-snob could expect.
Gazelle’s makes it super easy to go to their site, narrow down the product and then they use a “patent pending technology” to calculate what they pay for it. Besides using the cheesy “patent pending” clique its very straight forward and you can choose to sell or not. You may not make as much as on eBay, but this is for those of us that aren’t 100% in it for the money and hate the hassle. It’s also just perception, but on eBay or Amazon I don’t get the warm fuzzies inside that come with doing something good, but the spin Gazelles has makes me feel good about recycling.
In the end gazelle.com is a business like any other (right now claiming margins around 20%), but next time you’re done with a gadget make an effort to dispose of your older gadget with a green touch. Find a place to recycle or re-sell your gadget and be a little bit greener.
