All About Refurbished

Lets promote refurbished products

Category: Politics

What are the benefits of refurbishing?

There are many benefits of refurbished products and refurbishing in general. Probably the biggest one is “Sustainability” as the overall electronic waste, which we produce through destroying used products, as well as that the usage of raw materials, will be drastically reduced!

Just imagine that a new iPhone needs hundreds of individual components, which are produced all around the globe (Battery from South Korea, Camera from Japan, Audio Chips form the US) and finally assembled in China, before sold in each corner of the world.

If we even go one production step before, so to the point where the raw materials for Smartphone batteries are coming from, Sky News has done a shocking investigation on child labor, as young as four years old, who are working in Congolese mines to extract cobalt for smartphones. Here you get to the article and video: http://news.sky.com/story/meet-dorsen-8-who-mines-cobalt-to-make-your-smartphone-work-10784120

Even if this is an extreme example, it shows how brutal the industry is working to produce new electronic products!

Many of these negative examples, the high usage of raw materials and resources can be prevented, if more people are willing to re-use products. Offering products a “secondlife” by refurbishment is probably one of the best ways as it allows you to have a like-new device with just less carbon dioxide wasted through production!

The biggest fear of people buying “used” products is that you have any certainty that the product literally works. Exactly this is where refurbished products jump in. These products are not like classic used products, refurbished products have been tested and repaired to ensure that they function like new and depending on the grading criteria also look like new!

Where we are at the next benefit of refurbishing and refurbished products. You can buy a product, which functions like a new product and looks like it for a discounted price of up to 40%.

You probably ask yourself now: WHERE IS THE CATCH???

Honestly, I have asked myself the same question, when I was confronted with refurbished products the first time! But then I spend some more time investing on that topic, visited some of the largest refurbishers in Germany and realised…THERE IS NON!

If you buy from a trustworthy source these refurbishers are selling the product with a warranty, which ensures you that even, if there would be any problem with the product, you can just return it! The seller would repair or replace the product or if you request even repay you the purchasing price.

So just give it a try and buy your next electronic product “refurbished”. It will not only make your bank account happy, but also help the environment and Dorsen of course 🙂

“Circle Economy” – Re-Marketing / Refurbished in the politics

Sustainability is an important topic on nearly all political agendas of the last two decades. Mainly about ways to reduce the pollution and stop the climate change through renewable energy or restrictions of productions or car use. Around 5 years ago a new wording has been developed by researches and therefore picked-up by the politics in the industrial world: “circle economy”.

What is “circle economy”?

The idea behind the circle economy is to give each product the opportunity of a second life. One important part of this is refurbishment, but the meaning of this term is going even further. In theory base each ingredient, which has been used for the production of a product, should be re-used. The result would be no waste. But how is that even possible? This of course would require also a re-thinking of the manufacturer as they have to produce products on a different way, so they can be easily re-used in the future. As always this new thinking of the manufacturer, who see in this process a risk to their business (i.e. customers purchase each 2 years a new phone with their mobile contract), needs to be pushed through the politics with new regulations and laws.

How does the politic “pushes” re-marketing/refurbishment?

It is not possible to answer this question on a global scale as there sadly is no worldwide regulation. Nevertheless some countries have already set-up first processes to support the re-marketing industry:

US: In some states the governmental institutions have to purchase their products from refurbishers (i.e. PCs in an administrative office).

Sweden: In Sweden the government has reduced the VAT rate on product repair services from 25% to 12%.

EU: Within the EU the EU-commission is currently working on an industry analysis to receive more insights about this industry and how it can be supported to grow.

Job creation

By an increase of refurbishing activities the unemployment rate would be reduced as for the refurbishing/repair process you need more employees than for waste management or the new production. This of course is also an important point for the politics to support the development of this industry.

It is estimated that for every 10.000 tonnes of waste:

  • 1 job can be created incinerated
  • 6 jobs if it is landfilled
  • 36 if it is recycled
  • 296 if it is re-used/refurbished

 

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