A buyer of used mobile phones sits in front of the SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen.
(Credit: Jay Greene/CNET)
SHENZHEN, Guangdong province, China -- A young man, wearing a short-sleeve, white, button-down shirt, is looking at my 32-gigabyte iPhone 4S.
The man, sitting at a small stand in front of the massive SEG Electronics Market here, surfs to the settings page on the device, looks at the model number to determine where the phone came from. He sees it's a locked device. He notes there aren't any scratches or dings, and that it seems to work just fine. It should. I bought it last October, when the 4S first went on sale in the United States.
He offers me 2,300 renminbi, about $362.
"Xie xie," I say. Thank you. I move on.
I'm not really interested in selling my iPhone. I'm trying to learn what happens to iPhones when consumers get rid of them. In China, where Apple has sold more than 20 million iPhones in the last year, according to estimates by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst A.M. (Toni) Sacconaghi, Jr., consumers often come to stands like this one when it's time to move onto the next device. Where the device goes from there is a bit of a mystery.
The one thing that seems clear is that at the end of most mobile phones' lives in China, their components often wind up in a dumping site, a place such as Guiyu. That's a village that's become synonymous among enviro... [Read more]
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