When broken phones become a source of spare parts

Hello all,
When my mother sunk her new Huawei P8 lite, a couple of weeks after she bought it, never to have it back up and running again, I thought I’d keep her broken phone with me to freely supply (functioning?) parts to whomever might have needed spare parts on a broken P8 lite. Put differently, why should one throw away a broken phone if at least something can be re-cycled into another phone?
With something like a FairPhone I would expect this to be a natural way to proceed. Users of this forum might wish that broken Fairphones will have their parts replaced more easily, cost effectively, and possibly for a longer period of time, compared to other “non-fair” phones. But sooner or later there will be a growing number of broken phones whose parts might be re-used by others. Is this community growing -also- around this concept/possibility? I only found one post in which one user offered his spare parts for free.
Massimo

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Interesting idea. There are unofficial second hand market places for FP1 & FP2 in this forum and I remember when some phones were delivered with wrong colored back covers (because the ordered colors were out of stock) exchanging or reselling replaced covers was also explicitly encouraged.

So why not turn this thread into a kind of “unofficial spare parts exchange & market place”?

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Exactly. Though I am not sure that ‘unofficial’ is necessary, in this context. What I suggest in my post is that parts recycling (or recirculating) is well within the ethical manifesto of the company, so it should be enforced.
Massimo

The reason for using ‘unofficial’ on the forum for these things is to make people aware that the forum is a community effort, and Fairphone staff doesn’t monitor everything that goes on. The forum and the moderators are already often confused with official Fairphone support channels. In the context of sales between community members it is especially good to realise that it is just that: a sale between community members - it is in no way vetted by Fairphone (though on request support will verify whether IMEI numbers are valid and not reported stolen), nor do people buy directly from Fairphone.

I do think re-use should be encouraged, and at least the forum has been set up as a platform to do such a thing. Currently broken devices are sold/donated for spares via the respective device marketplace topics, but if someone wants to sell/donate individual parts a new topic can easily be opened.

Difficult to force people to do anything - as they mostly own the device outright it’s their decision how to dispose of it.

2 Likes

You are right, enforced was not the most appropriate term. Encourage sounds perhaps better.

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