Where your phone goes after you sell it

The most common question we get, once the money has landed, is what actually happens to the phone. The honest answer is one of three things, and we decide which within a day of it arriving.

Most devices are repaired and resold. A cracked screen, a tired battery, a broken camera: these are afternoon jobs for our workshop, shared with our parent company iMint, which has handled device lifecycles for years. The phone gets a second owner and stays out of the ground.

Devices beyond sensible repair are harvested. A phone with a dead board still has a good screen, camera modules, speakers and a frame, and those parts go on to keep other phones alive. This is why we can pay real money for faulty devices that other sites round down to zero.

Whatever remains after that is responsibly recycled through certified partners, and if a phone will never power on again, it can still do some good: our Phones for Football programme with Newbury United FC turns unsellable devices into support for grassroots football. Nothing here gets written off, including yours.