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eco ATM rolling out electronic recycling kiosks

While recycling computers and their peripherals has turned into a difficulty and sometimes pricey problem, at least one company in the United States looks like they have the answer for smaller electronic items.

Though they are starting small, with a single location in Omaha, NE and for cell phones only, ecoATM of San Diego, CA has plans for a much larger rollout after this modest test, with a larger test phase to begin soon, and a very large nationwide rollout to begin during the second quarter of 2010. The first recycling kiosk has already opened for business at the highly popular Nebraska Furniture Mart store in Omaha and the initial test period has proven the concept for ecoATM, which is ready to go to phase two.

The initial test kiosk in Omaha only accepts cell phones, which it automatically inspects for damages when they are inserted into the ecoATM machine. The inspection is camera-based and can recognize damage such as cracked screens, missing keys, and scuff marks, and then can determine a device’s approximate value, according to a CNET story. If the phone is determined to have intrinsic value, the customer gets a credit at the store in which the kiosk is located. If the phone is damaged and worth nothing, the owner can consign it to the recycle bin, in which case the owner still gets a small gift and, to be clearly environmentally friendly, a tree is planed in the name of the recycler.

An ecoATM spokesman, Eric Rosser, said “Today, a used consumer electronic goes into your drawer or garage, sits there until it decays to zero value, and then goes into a landfill. We want to change that paradigm so it’s more like car. When you’re done with a car you don’t just put it in your garage and leave it to rot.”

As more kiosks are rolled out, ecoATM will begin to include other devices in their recycling program, including MP3 players, digital cameras, notebooks, printers, and storage devices. The kiosk program seems to be a great answer for the recycling issue surrounding small electronics devices, an issue that is growing in importance as more consumers purchase and use more and more electronic gadgets and gizmos. If the program works, it could be a great boon to the recycling movement in the U.S.

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Posted by Sana Iqbal on Oct 5th, 2009 and filed under Others Stuff, Technolgy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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