As mentioned in title
In: Engineering
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Numerous things. They refurb them and sell them, they use them as warranty/insurance replacements. And sometimes they donate them to charity or organizations. If they are super old (like how sometimes they have the “trade in any phone for this deal” deal) They will send off the old phone for recycling.
They can even lose money on the trade-in, if they get another two years of $100 per month out of you.
Look up “loss leader”, that’s the main strategy behind deals that seem like they cost them more than you’d think it’s worth to them
When you trade in your phone to your provider, it usually ends up in one of two pipelines: Refurbishing or Recycling. To determine which pipeline your phone will end up in, someone will sit down and “grade” the phone on a scale from A to F. This involves going through a checklist to determine how the phone looks cosmetically. Something with a high grade will receive an A, and basically everything else will get less than that.
If the phone receives a grade of A or B, it enters the refurbishment pipeline. Here, a company will take a good look at the phone and do some further testing to see if anything on the phone needs to be replaced. If the phone needs a new battery, it will get a new battery. If it needs any major repairs, it’s usually either sold “as is” to another company or sent for recycling. After minor repairs are done, the phone is given a really good clean and then re-sold for a cheaper price or used as a replacement when someone else gets a replacement phone under warranty.
If the phone is going to be recycled, things get a bit more complicated. Most phones are “parted out”, where they’re disassembled and the individual parts are sold off to other people who use them to refurbish other phones. In some cases, if a phone has a broken screen, the actual part that makes the picture might still be good so the screen is sent to a company that scrapes off the broken glass and then reattaches the working part with brand new glass. That way the part that matters is still a factory original part and it’s just the glass that gets replaced.
If the phone cannot be disassembled, or if individual parts can’t be re-sold, they’re sent for recycling. Here, the entire phone is ground up into dust. The dust is then filtered for important materials worth a lot of money like gold, iron, lithium, aluminum etc. The raw materials are then processed and sold to companies who will use them to make new things!
They sell them to companies specializing on refurbishing and resale of phones. The phone manufacturers generally don’t do it themselves.
Electronic devices contain all sorts of valuable metals. The circuit board are shredded and then melted. The metals are extracted and sold.
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