Business Opportunities Weblog

Electronic Recycling Vending Machines

By on October 22, 2012 in Ideas

First you could drop off your extra pennies, nickels and dimes in exchange for dollar bills (minus 8.9%) at Coinstar vending machines. Then you could rent and return DVDs from their Redbox vending machines. Today, Coinstar has announced a new machine called ecoATM.

Earth2Tech has more:

Cash for high-tech trash. That’s the basic concept for the recycling kiosk from ecoATM. You drop off old electronics at one of these machines; it calculates their value, then pays you on the spot, in cash or coupons. The company says its secret sauce is the kiosks’ ability to automatically estimate — using electronic and visual techniques — a price of the unwanted items that will give consumers an immediate financial incentive to recycle at the station.

As of the middle of last year, the three-year old company had built a network of 50 buyers around the globe that take the used consumer electronics devices ecoATM collects from its kiosks (from mobile phones to iPods to MP3 players to game cartridges) and recycles the components. ecoATM says it finds the best price for the devices, then passes a portion of that revenue onto its customers.

Promotional video after the jump.

recycling vending

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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  • http://wahm.business-opportunities.biz Angela Shupe

    About time, I hope they become as popular as the coinstar change machines do. Not only would it help keep the devices out of the garbage, but the owner would be able to earn a little cash back on it. I know I wouldn’t mind earning a little money back from the BlackBerry I had to replace because the trackball stopped scrolling down.

  • recycle

    It brings the dream of a greener planet alive because the more people recycle, the more they can keep the planet clean. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4fY8BVyeuE

  • Tony A.

    Where can I find one of these Electronic Vending machines in my area? I want to see it work in person before I would get involved in owning one. I live in South New Jersey. Can you direct me to a machine in my area?
    Thank you.
    Tony A.

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