The refurbishment costs shown in Table 5 are very small and suggest that very little reprocessing takes place. Surveys of cell phone reuse practices in Europe and the USA indeed show that reprocessing is typically kept to a minimum, since the cost of most reprocessing operations is
higher than the resulting increase in resale value [5, 6].
We estimate that over 90% of all resold cell phones collected in the USA receive no or minimal reprocessing, such as testing, basic cosmetic treatment, and software updates. Interviews with managers from European take-back enterprises yielded similar results.