eBay jumps on the recycling bandwagon

You could argue that eBay Inc. has always been one of the greener websites out there – the whole point of the online auction house is to sell your unwanted belongings onto others who will find a use for them – and what’s greener than recycling? A recently unveiled shipping box recycling drive, and a new highly efficient data centre in Utah both back up the firm’s eco-clout. Also, eBay is certainly environmentally-friendly enough that Greenpeace hasn’t set its sights on them.
Now eBay is looking to up its green credentials even further with the introduction of eBay Instant Sale. The firm is so confident the new feature will help the environment it has even hosted it onto its special sub-domain green.ebay.com.
The basic jist is this – you have loads of old gadgets that you don’t want/need any more, but you don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up separate eBay listings for each one of them. With the new service, eBay will give you a base price for each gadget you want to sell, and if the price is right you can print out a pre-paid shipping label, and send the item off to eBay, who will then wipe it clean of personal data (taking a time-consuming and too-often-forgotten stage of the gadget-selling process out of your hands), and deposit the agreed fee in your PayPal account.
If your gadget is so old it isn’t worth anything any more, you can send it to eBay and the firm will recycle it gratis (A big plus for all of us gadget hoarders – yes, I am one too).
Services such as Instant Sale have existed for mobile phones for ages – here in the United Kingdom I can think of four such services that I know by name – but no one company (especially one as large as eBay) has created an over-arching gadget recycling service to help those of us who struggle to let go and finally cut the cord.