Envirofone Recycle Your Phone

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Envirofone quotes £1,450 for an iPhone Duo, £280 for a 128GB iPhone 15 in Excellent condition and up to £145 for an iPhone 11, and it pays by bank transfer on the day the handset reaches its Plymouth warehouse. Postage is free either way: the site emails a Royal Mail QR code you show at a Post Office counter, so there is no printer and no packaging to buy, and every parcel is tracked and covered to £150. Prices and terms read from Envirofone’s own pages on 2 November 2026.

It is the oldest name in the trade and the only one with an outside recommendation behind it. Which? made Envirofone a Which? Recommended Provider in its second-hand tech survey published on 22 October 2026, on a customer score of 80% with four stars across the board and five for value for money — one of only four retailers in the category to clear the bar. The company says it has paid out £160m since 2005 and given four million devices a second life, charges the seller nothing, and will add 7% if you take the money as store credit rather than cash.

Two structural facts belong up front, because both decide who you are dealing with. Every device is tested individually when it arrives, so the price you click is an offer that Envirofone confirms or revises before any money moves. And the company behind the brand is new: you contract with Envirofone Limited of Unit 37A Sisna Park Road, Plymouth PL6 7FH, company number 10452936, which traded as James Johnson Green Limited until 4 August 2026. The Envirofone Limited that ran the brand from Carlisle, company 07118572, was dissolved on 18 July 2026.

What the ten-second price actually is

Envirofone sells a process rather than a shop. You pick the make, the model and the storage, say what condition the handset is in and whether it is locked to a network, and the site returns a figure — it reckons the whole thing takes “about ten seconds”. You then have 14 days to post the device, which Royal Mail “usually has with us inside two working days”, and the company says “most trade-ins are done inside a week from start to finish”.

The money side is genuinely good, and it is worth saying so before anything else. There is no seller fee and no listing fee, so the quote is the gross and the net at once. Postage is free in three different ways: a Royal Mail QR code by email “to show at the Post Office counter, so you never need a printer”, a collection booked from your door, or a free padded pack posted out to you. Payment is “on the same day of receipt (Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays)” by bank transfer, or as store credit with 7% added — on the £280 offered for a 128GB iPhone 15 that is an extra £19.60, and the site prints exactly that figure, so the two numbers reconcile to the penny.

One number does not reconcile. The terms say same-day payment “does not apply to items delivered to us after 2pm”; the about-us page says it is “Subject to your device or devices being processed before 3pm”. An hour either way matters to somebody posting on a Friday, and nothing on the site explains which document governs. Work to the 2pm in the terms, because that is the one in the contract.

What you are handing over is covered to a limit rather than to its value. Royal Mail claims are capped at £150 and DPD at £100, which covers the £145 an iPhone 11 is worth and does not cover the £280 on an iPhone 15 or the £1,450 on the top of the range. On anything above £150 the sensible move is a separately insured courier, and the site does not say so.

Three days or seven working days, and whether saying nothing counts as yes

Everything about a phone trade-in turns on what happens after the parcel leaves your hands. Envirofone is open about the mechanism — “we test every one of them and confirm the offer before any money moves”, and “Every device is tested individually, so occasionally the condition differs from the one described and the offer changes”. That is the honest description of the trade, and most of the complaints in it come from sellers who did not know it was coming.

The question is what a revised offer obliges you to do, and Envirofone’s own two documents answer it differently. The how-it-works page gives you “Three days to accept or decline any revised price”, says “Declining costs you nothing” and states flatly that “nothing is processed until you agree”. The terms and conditions give seven: “Quotes not accepted after 7 working days will be automatically accepted on your behalf”, and again, “If there is no contact for 7 days we will automatically process your payment at the amended price”. Seven working days is nearly a fortnight once a bank holiday is in it.

The two statements disagree about more than the clock. One says silence does nothing and the other says silence is acceptance, and the home page sits on top of both with “No hidden reductions. No confusing terms. Just fair pricing at every step.” Envirofone also promises, in terms, to “pay the full amount quoted for your device if the condition matches what you select during checkout” — a promise about grading accuracy, not about the auto-acceptance rule, and the two are easy to read as the same thing.

None of this makes the mechanism improper. A buyer that cannot reprice a handset it has graded as cracked would have to quote for the worst case on everything, and the sellers of good phones would pay for it. But the rule a seller is held to is the one in the terms, so treat the window as seven working days from the day the email lands, answer it, and do not rely on the sentence that says nothing happens until you agree. If you do decline, the stated turnaround for the return is short: “If you reject a counter offer for your order we will return your device/s. Please allow 2-3 working days.”

Two payment facts belong beside it. Store credit is “valid for 12 months from date of issue”, so a bonus taken in credit has an expiry that cash does not. And the terms are blunt about mistakes: “We cannot, under any circumstances, recall or reissue bank transfer payments once they have been made”, which puts the burden of a mistyped account number entirely on the seller.

One iPhone 15, three prices on the same website

Envirofone publishes a price for every model and then publishes other prices for the same model elsewhere. On 2 November 2026 the iPhone section of the sell pages gave “iPhone 15, up to £455”. The iPhone 15 trade page itself gave £280 for a 128GB handset in Excellent condition, £240 in Fair and “up to £160” in Faulty, with the instruction to “Choose your storage size above to see the exact price for your device”. A comparison panel further down that same page said Envirofone offers “up to £340”.

There is an innocent explanation for two of the three. The £455 is almost certainly a 512GB handset in Excellent condition, and the page says in terms that “The figures below are the most we pay for each model - the exact quote depends on storage size and condition”. The £340 matches nothing: not a grade, not a storage tier, and no footnote on the page explains it. A reader who arrives on the model page expecting the £455 they saw on the index, and finds £280, is doing the arithmetic the site should have done for them.

The same page carries the problem in miniature two sentences apart. “The figures below are the most we pay for each model” is immediately followed by “Prices shown are starting prices and may vary based on storage capacity and device condition”. A ceiling and a floor cannot both be true of one number, and it is the single cheapest thing on this site to fix.

The grade definitions themselves are clear and unusually generous at the bottom end, which is worth credit. Excellent means “Powers on, fully functional, no cracks or chips, screen and back glass free of scratches” and “Not engraved or personalised”. Fair allows “light scratches on the screen or casing”, explicitly allows engraving — “Engraving or personalisation is fine at this grade” — and still requires “No cracks or screen damage”. Faulty covers “cracked screen or back, water damage, or a faulty battery” and still pays £160 on an iPhone 15, which is more than several sellers pay for a working one. Two hard conditions sit underneath all three: “Battery health must be above 80%” and the handset must “not be barred; PIN/Account locked, be of UK specification; and not be reported lost or stolen”.

The company that buys your phone also sells it back to you

Almost nothing else in this trade publishes both halves of the transaction. Envirofone does: it runs a refurbished shop on the same domain, so you can read what it pays and what it charges on the same afternoon. The cheapest refurbished iPhone 15 on its own shop was £349.99 on 2 November 2026. The most it pays for a 128GB iPhone 15 in Excellent condition was £280. The gap is £69.99, about 20% of the sale price.

That gap is not profit and it should not be read as one. Out of it come the inbound postage, a seventy-point functional test — “Each phone and tablet goes through a seventy point checklist before we list it for sale”, with the company’s own rule that “if a phone does not function 100% we will not sell it” — a certified data wipe, cosmetic grading, a replacement battery where one is needed, free outbound delivery, a free 12-month warranty “covering both hardware and software”, 30 days of no-questions returns and the cost of the ones that come back. Twenty per cent to carry all of that is tight rather than greedy, and setting the two numbers side by side is a fairer way to judge a trade-in price than any league table.

What the shop promises is specific. “You have 30 days from delivery to return your purchase for a full refund”, with refunds “to your original payment method within 5 working days” of the device arriving back and being inspected, and a “Free return if it arrived damaged”. The warranty runs 12 months on the device and six months on accessories and batteries, covering “defects in materials and workmanship, including issues with the screen, speakers, buttons” and excluding “accidental damage (including screen cracks or liquid ingress)”, cosmetic wear and unauthorised repairs. Orders before 3pm on a weekday are “usually dispatched within 2-3 working days with free tracked delivery”, with standard shipping taking “3-5 working days”, a SIM tool in the box and the honest warning that “Original manufacturer boxes and headphones aren’t guaranteed”. There is a downloadable VAT invoice on every order.

Two numbers in that promise do not match each other. The buy pages advertise “our battery health guarantee, minimum 85 percent”; the buying FAQs say “If a device falls below 80% of its original capacity we replace it during refurbishment”. Five percentage points of battery is the difference between a phone that lasts a day and one that does not, and nothing on the site reconciles them. The grade names have the same problem: the refurbished guide calls them “Pristine, Excellent or Good” while the FAQs describe Like New, Excellent and Good. One of the two is out of date.

Reading the depreciation curve off its own price list

A recycler’s price list is the only published record of what a phone is actually worth second-hand, and Envirofone’s runs the whole way down. On 2 November 2026: iPhone Duo £1,450, iPhone 18 Pro Max £1,250, iPhone 18 Pro £1,200, iPhone 17 Pro Max £880, iPhone 17 Pro £740, iPhone 17 £550, iPhone Air £530, iPhone 17e £370, iPhone 16 Pro Max £670, iPhone 16 £620, iPhone 15 £455, iPhone 14 £350, iPhone 13 £280, iPhone 12 £220, iPhone 11 £145 and, at the bottom, “Older iPhones, up to £30”.

Lay those out and the shape is not a smooth slope. The steep part is the first year — £1,250 to £880 between the 18 Pro Max and the 17 Pro Max is £370, about 30% gone in a generation — and then it flattens: £455 to £350 to £280 to £220 across the 15, 14, 13 and 12. By the iPhone 11 the whole handset is worth £145, which is 10% of the top of the list, and one generation further back the ceiling collapses to £30. The money in a trade-in is in doing it early; the decision a reader is actually making is whether to sell now or next year, and the answer on these figures is now.

There is a floor under the old end of the list, and it is regulatory rather than commercial. Ofcom’s own switch-off page records that Vodafone and EE “completed” their 3G switch-offs “in early 2024”, that “Three has switched off its 3G network across most of the UK”, and that “All MNOs have confirmed to the Government that they will switch off 2G by 2033 at the latest”, with individual operators free to go earlier. Its advice is unambiguous: “All 2G devices will need to be upgraded to at least 4G.” And one fact bites today rather than in 2033 — Ofcom states that “Three doesn’t have a 2G network”, so a 2G-only handset is already a non-working phone on Three and on the brands that run on it. A handset that cannot hold a usable connection has no resale market, which is what the £30 ceiling at the foot of the list is measuring.

Envirofone itself does not sort its list by anything a shopper can filter. It says “Show all 43 iPhone models” and the price index is grouped by family rather than by value, so the comparison above is arithmetic the reader has to do. It is worth doing: the difference between selling an iPhone 13 and an iPhone 11 is £135, and the difference between an iPhone 11 and the generation before it is £115.

Who you are actually selling to, and five answers to how old the brand is

Envirofone is the oldest consumer name in British phone recycling and it has changed hands twice in six years. The ownership chain is all on public record and none of it is on the website.

TES, an IT lifecycle group, announced on 14 August 2020 from Macclesfield that it had “come to a definitive agreement with the administrators of Redeem UK Limited” to buy that company’s assets, “includ[ing] the Envirofone brand name, trade-in consumer websites, recycling program, and backend systems”. The release gives the only audited-period scale figures anyone has published for the business: “almost 50,000 units” traded and “over £9 million back to customers” in the twelve months from April 2019 to April 2020, and it dates the brand to 1999. Gary Steele, then Group CEO at TES, and John Paul Doble, Director of Technology Supplies International Ltd, are quoted.

The brand moved again in September 2025, when, as the mobile trade press reported, SK TES sold it to the recommerce operators Matt Green and Sam Hargreaves, with Lewis Cox as their partner; the same report put the business at around 40,000 devices a year and a 30% growth target, with grading and refurbishment brought in-house. That is trade reporting rather than a company document, and it is corroborated exactly by Companies House. Envirofone Limited, company 10452936, was incorporated on 31 October 2016 under the name James Johnson Green Limited — after its three founding directors, Liam James, Aaron James Johnson and Matthew Lawrence Green. Lewis Michael Cox and Samuel Jack Hargreaves were appointed directors on 1 September 2025, Matthew Green was notified as the person with significant control on 13 June 2025 in place of James Green Holdings Limited, and the company changed its name to Envirofone Limited by resolution on 3 August 2026, with the certificate issued on 4 August 2026. The predecessor, Envirofone Limited of James Watson House, Carlisle, company 07118572, was incorporated on 7 January 2010, filed under SIC 99999 as a dormant company and was dissolved on 18 July 2026.

The practical consequence is that the counterparty is a small company with a three-month-old name. It files “Total exemption full accounts”, most recently to 31 March 2025 with the next set due by 31 December 2026, so no turnover, profit or headcount is published anywhere, and its registered office is the Plymouth unit the contact page gives as the postal address. On the evidence available, every scale figure the site quotes — four million customers, £160m paid out — belongs to the brand’s whole history across three owners rather than to the company that now holds it, and the site does not draw that distinction.

Nor does it settle how old the brand is. The home page says “Trusted mobile recycling since 2005” and “21 yrs of keeping tech out of landfill”; the how-it-works page says “£160m paid out to customers since 2005”; the about-us page says “Since 2005”, then “Buying from customers for over 15 years”, then “Two decades of trading”; and the acquirer’s own 2020 release says the business was “established in 1999”. That is five answers to one question, the oldest of which would make the brand 27 rather than 21. A company underselling its own age is a small thing, and it is the kind of stale copy that makes a reader wonder what else has not been read since it was written.

The outside recommendation is for the shop, not for the trade-in

Nothing independent rates phone recyclers. Defaqto and Fairer Finance do not reach retail at all, Smart Money People does not cover it, and Ofcom’s complaints tables measure networks rather than the shops that sell or buy handsets — so for most of this trade there is no outside measure of any kind. Envirofone is the exception, and the exception is narrower than the badge suggests.

Which? published its second-hand tech retailer survey on 22 October 2026, with prices “correct as of 22 October 2026” and the next update scheduled for September 2027. It drew on 2,495 people and about 4,104 experiences of buying second-hand devices since June 2023, with fieldwork conducted in June and July 2025. Four retailers cleared the bar: Samsung Certified Re-Newed at 83%, The iOutlet at 83%, Dell at 81% and Envirofone at 80%. The threshold is a customer score of at least 80%, at least four stars for customer service and at least four stars for value for money, with Which? also reviewing returns policies and terms and excluding retailers whose returns information is unclear or misleading. Envirofone took four stars across the board and five for value for money. Envirofone’s about-us page describes the award accurately — “Which? Recommended Provider for refurbished tech retailers, October 2026” — and adds, correctly, “Independently assessed, not paid for”.

Read the scope, though. That survey asked people about buying second-hand tech. It did not measure what any of the four pay for a handset, how often a quote is revised on inspection, or how quickly a declined device comes back — which is the entire service this page is about, and which Which? itself notes is Envirofone’s main business. So the 80% is a real, dated, independent figure about the shop, and there is still no independent measure anywhere of the trade-in.

One more thing the Which? write-up makes visible. It records that the brand was acquired in September 2025 by recommerce specialists “including the co-founder and director of The iOutlet” — and The iOutlet is the other 83% entry in the same list of four. Two of the four Which? Recommended Providers for second-hand tech share a director, which Companies House confirms and which neither company’s site mentions. That is not a criticism of either, and the survey measures customer experience rather than corporate independence, but a reader treating the four names as four unconnected opinions should know it is three.

Data, CheckMend and the lock that prices a phone at zero

The security side is where the site promises most and documents least. It advertises “A certified data wipe on every device, so a factory reset is optional”, says devices are “wiped to a certified standard as part of the inspection” and that data destruction happens “before the device goes anywhere else”. Across the sell pages, the help centre and the recycling page, no standard, no certificate and no accreditation is named — not a recognised erasure specification, not an auditor, not an approved treatment facility. The claim may be perfectly true and there is nothing published to check it against.

The terms meanwhile hand the duty back: “it is your responsibility to ensure so far as practicable that Data is removed from the device”. Both things can be right at once — the seller should wipe, and the processor should wipe again — but a sales page that calls a factory reset “optional” and a contract that makes removal the seller’s responsibility are pulling in opposite directions, and the contract is the one that counts. Wipe the handset, sign out of the account, and remove the SIM.

Activation Lock is the one that costs money. Envirofone will not process a locked iPhone — “We can’t process your trade-in until Activation Lock is removed” — and the terms set “the amended price for Activation Locked phones which is £0”. A locked device does not simply wait: “Any device sent in locked to iCloud or password protected will be postponed but the valid to date continues”, so the 14-day price guarantee keeps running while nothing can happen, and getting the handset back means you “will be required to provide a shipping label or pay a return fee”. Ten minutes with the phone in your hand before you post it is the whole of the fix.

Stolen-goods screening is strict and the consequences are spelled out. Every device is checked against CheckMend, and Envirofone “reserve[s] the right to withhold payment and destroy any devices which are listed as lost/stolen/insurance claimed/blocked on the CheckMend website”. A handset that “fails a blacklist check or is non genuine (counterfeit)” is returned “at your own cost”, and the company says plainly that it “will not ship the device back to you free of charge” in that case. Only UK-specification handsets are accepted, unlocked or locked to a UK network; “Any foreign unit, or a locked foreign unit, will be classed as not working.” That is the right policy for a buyer in this trade, and it means an insurance replacement with paperwork missing is a genuine risk rather than a theoretical one.

Store credit at 7%, points at 5%, and a voucher that needs a £200 basket

Three different ways of being paid are advertised and they are not equally good. Bank transfer is the simple one. EnviroCash is store credit “with 7% extra” — £19.60 on a £280 iPhone 15 — and it is “valid for 12 months from date of issue”, so it is a 7% uplift with a deadline attached, and only worth taking by somebody who was going to buy a refurbished device anyway. EnviroCharity sends the full value to a good cause; the site names a partnership with ZSL, “protecting gorillas in the wild”, and publishes no terms for the donation.

EnviroRewards is a separate scheme and it is where the small print lives. Points are earned on paid trade-ins and shop orders, “Every 100 points is £5”, and the earn rate is tiered: 5% as standard, 6.25% at Silver and 7.5% at Gold, with Silver and Gold members also getting a trade-in cash boost of 3% and 5% capped at £20 a trade-in. Points “expire after 24 months with no earning or spending”, a voucher made from them is “valid for 12 months”, and the rule that matters is the basket: “one voucher per order on orders of £200 or more”. On a catalogue whose cheapest listed iPad is £129.99, a voucher you have earned cannot be spent on a large part of the shop at all. Points also “have no cash value and can only be spent as vouchers in the Envirofone shop”, and the cash boost “is not paid on a trade-in donated in full to charity or placed through a partner”.

Two percentages for store value sit on the same site without being reconciled anywhere: the 7% EnviroCash uplift printed beside every quote, and the 7.5% Gold earn rate on the rewards page. Neither page refers to the other. If you intend to take credit rather than cash, the sum worth doing is 7% of the quote against the price of the same refurbished handset elsewhere, because the uplift is only worth anything if the shop is where you were going to spend.

No phone line, and no adjudicator behind the chat window

Support is a live chat window, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, “Excluding bank holidays”. The contact page says so in as many words: “We do not have a phone line.” No email address, no response-time promise and no out-of-hours route is published; the postal address is the Plymouth unit. For a business whose customers are mostly waiting for a parcel or a payment, 40 hours of coverage a week with no telephone is thin, and the company does not pretend otherwise.

Behind the chat there is nothing. The terms, the help centre and the contact page carry no complaints procedure, no escalation stage, no deadlock point and no alternative dispute resolution scheme, and no ombudsman is named anywhere. That is not unusual and it is not a breach of anything: selling goods is not a regulated financial service, so there is no Financial Ombudsman Service jurisdiction and no equivalent of the telecoms adjudicators that cover an airtime contract. Several large retailers nonetheless publish a route to an approved ADR body, and Envirofone publishes none, so a dispute that chat cannot settle goes to the county court.

Two documentary gaps sit alongside it. The terms and conditions carry no version number and no effective date — the only date on the page is a “© Copyright 2026” line — so there is no way to tell which version you agreed to or whether it has changed since. And they give the company name and number but no registered office; the Plymouth address appears on the page only as the delivery address for handsets. Both are minutes of work to fix and both are visible to anyone who reads before posting a £280 phone.

What happens to the handsets that cannot be sold again

The environmental claim is the part of the proposition with the least behind it, which is worth knowing before taking it at face value. The recycling page says a device that can work again is tested, refurbished and resold — “the best outcome there is for it” — and that what cannot be reused “is stripped for working parts, and the remainder goes for materials recovery so the metals and components are used again”, with “Nothing to landfill”. The about-us page goes further: “we can guarantee that 100% of our mobiles are reused, refurbished or recycled.”

No treatment partner is named, no approved authorised treatment facility is identified, no tonnage or recovery rate is published, and the words WEEE, carbon and CO2 do not appear on the page at all. The Environment Agency publishes quarterly figures for electrical and electronic equipment placed on the market and waste equipment collected across the UK — the data set was last updated on 1 September 2026 and now runs to quarter 2 of 2026 — so the framework a claim like this sits inside is public, and Envirofone does not place itself in it. A 100% guarantee with no audited number behind it is a claim about intent rather than a measured result, and the honest version would be cheaper to publish than the guarantee.

The commercial logic does point the right way, which is the warm half of the same fact. A company that makes its margin on the £349.99 resale has every reason to repair rather than shred, and its own refurbishment rule — “if a phone does not function 100% we will not sell it” — is the kind of standard that produces parts rather than landfill. The business model is the evidence; the guarantee is not.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 2 November 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.