Israeli Vending Machine Starts Offering Sale, Trade and Recycling of Used Phones

An Israeli company has created a vending machine that allows consumers to recycle, sell or upgrade to a better — refurbished — phone model.

RE-Refurbished Smartphones Revolution, founded in 2015, provides a one-stop-shop machine that aims to save on the energy, natural resources and mining-related environmental damage associated with producing smartphones.

Currently the machines are available at three stores in Tel Aviv and 14 in Europe — in Finland, Germany and Spain.

To use the machine, customers first need to enter the phone’s serial number so that the system can check it belongs to them. After ticking a few boxes, customers put their phones on the sensor pad, where an artificial intelligence system checks that the claims made about your phone are correct, and gives a price. Unfortunately, the price can be much lower than what the phone might fetch on the secondhand market.

The Times of Israel reporter’s iPhone 12 was valued at NIS 1,090 ($308.50). For an additional NIS 2,010 ($600), it could have been traded for a good-as-new refurbished, fully tested and unlocked 128 GB iPhone 12 Pro Max with a 12-month warranty.

Customers can either trade in a phone for a better model — in which case a flap opens, gulps down the phone and replaces it with an upgrade — or sell it, in which case the automat swallows the phone and pays for it right away by bank transfer, PayPal.

All phones are then sent to a laboratory where the content is “forensically wiped,” in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.