Reboxed - changing how the world thinks about used tech
by Startacus Admin
Reboxed is a Brixton-based sustainable commerce startup that's created a smarter, safer, more sustainable way to buy and sell your tech
In 2020, Apple was fined €25m by France's competition and fraud watchdog for deliberately degrading the performance of older iPhone models, arguably in an attempt to force users to upgrade; a practice it still applies to older models.
Every year, this combines with our desire to have the latest phone to create 50 million tonnes of e-waste, much of which sits in landfills. A single iPhone X will be responsible for 79kg of carbon dioxide in its lifetime, which is about the same as burning 9 gallons of petrol. Most of these millions of phones thrown away every year have nothing wrong with them; they simply aren’t the newest model.
Brixton-based sustainable commerce startup Reboxed is trying to combat this waste with its platform that buys, refurbishes, and sells phones.
They use a 70-point diagnostic check on phones to determine their condition to give sellers the best price and pass on savings of up to 40% to the buyer for quality devices. Currently, they only buy and sell iPhones and Samsung phones, with the occasional related product such as Airpods, and only in London.
As well as monetary savings, Reboxed is adding environmental savings into the mix by planting 10 trees for every phone rehomed in order to offset its lifetime carbon emissions and make it carbon positive. With the goal of 100 million phones rehomed by 2030, that’s a lot of trees.
In December, Reboxed announced that it had raised £500,000 in pre-seed funding in 2020, most recently, £350,000 from angel investors.
This funding round also resulted in a new board member in Charlo Carabott, co-founder of Mazuma, a mobile phone recycling company, so their knowledge base and expertise have also greatly benefitted.
We have written many times before that the amount of waste we are producing is in danger of overwhelming our capacity to deal with the consequences, and it is good to see another startup entering the push to combat this grave issue.
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Published on: 10th January 2021
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