Earth Month might be over, but at Best Buy, we think about our environmental footprint every day of the year. In addition, we help our customers live more sustainably, including offering a convenient place to responsibly recycle unwanted electronics.
Before you bring in your items for recycling, check to see if your tech still has value with our Trade-In Calculator. Depending on the item, Best Buy might give you a gift card for your used tech, which will then be re-sold giving the product a new life. Best Buy’s Trade-In program offers more categories than any other retailer.
Let’s say your tech item doesn’t have resale value and gets recycled. Have you ever wondered what happens to that old laptop or cell phone you brought in? We can walk you through the process:
- Say good-bye: After you take one more picture of the dinosaur so you can show it to your kids one day, hand it over to our Blue Shirt.
- Onto the truck: We package up the electronic waste we collect and ship it to our contracted recycling partners, who we make sure handle the items responsibly.
- Break-up time: The devices are then taken apart, sorted and shredded by high tech machines (and sometimes people).
- Meeting new friends: Don’t be sad. These tiny pieces, that are now sorted, are sent to various processors to be made into new products.
- New life: The plastics from your laptop or cell phone casing can become park benches or buckets. The metals can be make into ladders, auto parts, bridges and even new electronics.
It’s the circle of life for electronics. We’re proud to have collected 175 million pounds of electronics and appliances for recycling last year. That brings us closer to our goal of collecting 2 billion pounds by 2020.
Check out the items you can bring into Best Buy for recycling. Remember, we’ll take it no matter where you bought it.
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