ecoATM: Where Jubbling Meets Capitalism

A guy walks into a bar with a pile of crap in his hands and he says to the bartender – “look at what I almost stepped in!”

San Diego, CA  10/1/2009 - I’m not sure how to classify this new Jubbling concept out of ecoATM.  It’s founded on “green” ideals that we need to automate our processes for recycling old electronics and specifically cell phones.  Great idea.  But the best way ecoATM decided to do this was through a large ATM being placed in a retail space and I think that is where they’ve lost me and some of their Jubbling.  Their goal is admirable but the delivery system they’ve created, the actual ecoATM, is truly “back-assward” and seems to defeat the purpose of what it’s trying to do and that is to be Jubbling.

One of the team members, Seth Heine, founded two other companies for recycling cellphones – Collective Good and GreenPhone.com.  Both sites operate on the same principles as NextWorth and handle your cellphone recycling via the mail.  So why make the move to ecoATM?  I’m not really sure but the only advantage of the ecoATM system is that it might get more traffic and recycle more phones due to our high immediate need to receive value for an old cellphone.  The irony is that it might also be a good way to fence a stolen cellphone.

Now I don’t want to bash ecoATM too much because again, it’s Jubbling and I’m hoping the founders intentions were noble and rooted in doing something positive.  It looks like Seth Heine has been Jubbling for a while but I’m not sure of his compadres on the ecoATM team; they seem to be standing behind the “green” movement like it’s a corporate shield.   I can only imagine what their executive meetings are like when you bring a group together made up of members looking at the “collective good” sitting across from members who are all about the bottomline.

I am willing to offer my help, unpaid as usual, to the folks at ecoATM for future versions of their product.  We’ll call it ecoATM .2 and it will consist of a cardboard box with a person standing in it holding a pad of post-its, a pen, 12 potted saplings and a paper garbage bag for your cell phone.  ecoATM .2 will go through a week of training on the cellphones they’ll take back and what they’re worth.  If your phone has value, you’ll get a store credit from our guy.  If not, you’ll get a sapling.

Check out their website for when an ecoATM [or ecoATM .2] will be in your area and see what you think. It’s seems to be kind of a Jubbling oxymoron and for now, I’m sticking with NextWorth until I’m proven wrong.  They’ll recycle/reuse more than just cellphones and they seem to have a more effective business model.