What is Free and Easy and earns you money... no not me.... (envirofone.com)

Member Name: Sarccyslayer

Product:	envirofone.com
Date:	27/04/07 (268 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Really easy to use website to trade in your mobile phone

Disadvantages: None that I can see

Envirofone isn’t a title which is catchy (maybe they should ask me to come up with something more suitable) but it does describe perfectly well what it does once you get yourself acquainted with the website.

Many of us upgrade out existing mobile phones on a yearly basis, I certainly do and consider it to a perk of my contract with Vodafone, but what happens to my ‘old’ phone once I no longer need it anymore? Well if it is in a near perfect condition then I could consider selling it on Ebay or Amazon to earn myself some money, after all it didn’t cost me anything in the first place… or I could send it to Envirofone in exchange for Cash or Argos Credits and save myself some trouble. A few friends of mine told me that Envirofone was really easy to use and the cash for phones was relatively good.

So, to find out more information about Envirofone I went to their website which can be found at www.envirofone.com and when you arrive there it tells you that it is only available to residents of UK, Ireland and the Netherlands. To gain access to the homepage all you need to do is click on the appropriate flag of your country to enter.

The homepage itself is coloured in Bright orange and black and is really distinctive and easy to read with lots of brightly coloured examples of how much your phone could be worth. Across the top of the homepage you will see eight differently titled options to click on to find out more about the website and for anyone who has never used this site before, then I would suggest you take your time to read through everything properly.

The first option is ‘Home’ and this simply brings you back to the homepage where you first started your journey whenever you feel the need to go back there. This is closely followed by ‘About us’ and this section speaks for itself with the title because it gives you a lot of information about who and what Envirofone is with some added examples called Testimonials as to how valuable this scheme is to registered charities who benefit.

The next button along is ‘My Account’ and this will take you to your own account once you have registered and here you will find all of the information you have supplied to date, which phones you have traded in and how much money you have got in return and there is also some helpful notes which tell you whether the transaction has taken place or is pending and that simply means that your phone may not have arrived with them yet or it hasn’t been tested and the suitable reward decided. You can also use this section to order more returns packs which are completely free to use and to change any data which you have given to them. Following on from this we come to Register and I don’t think this needs much explanation but you simply register your details as and when you decide to sign up to the website and start to trade in your old mobile phone and once you register, if you choose to use the Argos Credits as a method of payment then a Card will be sent to you which Envirofone will automatically update.

As ever with any website there is a FAQ section which is really well detailed and gives good explanations into how the site works and when you receive your money etc… again something which should be read thoroughly and carefully to avoid any confusion.

The next two sections which are Advertise and Affiliates is designed for companies who would like to advertise their services on Envirofone through advertisements particularly because they get over 26 million hits a month and to some businesses this could be quite lucrative. Finally we come to the contact us section which probably one of the best laid out sections I have seen on a website. Everything is clearly laid out with different categories to use to answer your questions or present them to the team behind Envirofone and they usually reply really quickly to any of your queries.

So once you have managed to read everything there is to read and you have in that time found that you have rather a lot of mobile phones laying around your home, your office or even in the car and you would like to know what you could potentially get then simply go back to the homepage and on the left hand side of the screen you will see in bright orange two words “Start Here” followed by ‘How much is your old mobile phone worth?’ Then you simply choose your phones manufacturer and if you know the mobile you can put that in too, if not it doesn’t matter you can search through the available models until you find your own phone. So if I should decide to trade in my current phone which is a Sony Ericsson W900(i) it tells me that I could exchange and trade it in for £47.94 in cash or £55.13 in Argos Credits and to trade in my phone, once I have signed up I click on ‘Trade in this phone’, choose my payment option, click finish and white jiffy envelope will be sent to me within the next few days and I simply send them my phone and await for the credit or the cash to be given to me. You will be notified by email when this is happening.

If there happens to be any problem with your phone, then Envirofone will always contact you before taking any further decisions, for example if you are offered £50 for your phone but it turns out that it fails the standard tests and they change that to £10 the choice would be yours whether to go ahead or have your phone sent back to you, all of this is explained within the terms and conditions on the FAQ section. If for any reason you find that your mobile phone isn’t listed, then you can contact Envirofone who will list the phone for you, providing it is less than 3 years old.

So what happens to your mobile phone once you have traded it in for money? Envirofone will recycle your phone for you. Their method of recycling is much better for the environment than if you just throw it away to end up in a land fill site potentially harming the environment and when statistics state that 10 million mobile phones are upgraded every year that is a lot of waste.

The mobile phones that Envirofone receive are then either re-used wherever possible in areas around the world which need them or if the mobile phones cannot be re-used, they are recycled in the appropriate manner and the method of recycling is explained through a pdf. file which you can open up on your screen and read. They then use their charity and corporate partners to support their causes or as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes and you can read some of the Testimonials from some of those charities in the ‘About us’ section so you know that your mobile phone is going to help good causes.

So having read everything I have got to say but you still want to think it over, well you can set up an email reminder through Envirofone to remind between one month and 1 year’s time that they are still there, just so you don’t forget about them.

I have been using Envirofone for just over a year now and have recycled at least 4 mobile phones through them and they are really good with their delivery of return envelopes and the awarding of the Cash or Credits. If I didn’t use Envirofone then I would probably leave mobile phones in my desk draw on in a box at home gathering dust along with many other people and as much as I get annoyed with people going on and on about recycling it is important and what’s more doing it this way is easy, time saving and relatively straightforward so I do recommend that people go and have a look and then dig our all those old mobile phones and exchange them.

Summary: An online site designed to help and encourage the recycling of mobile phones