There are more mobile phones than people, in the UK – and that’s a fact. The reason for this lies with people like myself, who upgrade and upgrade and upgrade and are just too plain lazy to do anything with their previous handsets (unless you have younger siblings who see hand-me-downs as Godsends).

My younger sister has now reached a point where she turns her nose up at my discarded Samsung Soul and so I’ve had to think of new ways to flog my old mobile and extract some cash in doing so.

And so it’s great to hear of self-service kiosks that take your old phone off your hands in return for money! A new eCycling Station has been devised that inspects your phone electronically, assigns it an on-the-spot secondary market value, and churns out gift vouchers or cash if the phone is still worth something. If it’s worthless, you can simply consign the device to the recycle bin to be refurbished or disposed of in an eco-friendly fashion.

The machines use a camera-based system to detect the condition of the phone, looking for signs of wear like cracked screens, missing keys, and scuff marks. The cameras then help to weigh-up a value for the phone.

Right now, the self-service kiosk only accepts phones but in future they will be able to accept and recognise other gadgets such as MP3 players, digital cameras, notebooks, printers, and storage devices.