When it comes to renewing their smartphone, more and more French people are turning to refurbished. Awareness of the environment still hampered by a few obstacles to purchasing, which must be overcome by focusing on the ability to collect, restore and redistribute at the national level.
What if for Christmas, we offered refurbished products? As a result of a growing desire to consume better and more responsibly, the trend is confirmed among the French, more and more numerous to worry about the environmental impact of digital technology. Sign of this awareness, the used telephone market exceeded one billion euros in 2020, including 700 million for refurbished – a figure up + 25% over one year. More than one in three French people (34%) have already bought a second-hand smartphone, and 14% of them say they consider being convinced during their next purchase.
Smartphones necessary, but polluting
True totems of our digital societies, our beloved smartphones are now omnipresent in our daily lives: at the end of 2020, more than eight in ten French people (84%) owned at least one, according to the latest Digital Barometer. A success that has its downside: major emitters of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, smartphones represented 11% of the global digital sector footprint in 2019, according to a report on the subject by the Senate . Necessary, but polluting, smartphones are above all too often ephemeral goods, 84% of their owners claiming to have held them for less than three years.
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Problem: Buying a brand new phone and changing it often is still the norm. Habits that die hard and that, above all, contradict the necessary fight against climate change. Putting digital into a logic of sustainability therefore implies encouraging, on the one hand, consumers to recycle their old equipment – a reflex that too few of us adopt, 53% of French people still keeping their old phones in their homes. drawers – and, on the other hand, to opt for reconditioned products.
The shortage of electronic components that is hitting companies also invites us to change our outlook on refurbished products, which appear more than ever as a model of the future in terms of supply.
Focus on the national market to build confidence
This turn can only be fully initiated if certain persistent brakes are lifted. If the price and environmental considerations play in favor of the refurbished, the lack of visibility on the lifespan of the product, as well as the mistrust vis-à-vis sellers, remain significant obstacles. Only a real effort of transparency, throughout the process, will make it possible to remove these last obstacles and to create the confidence necessary for the full development of the refurbished. And because product quality is vital for customers who do not hesitate to compare new and second-hand offers, the issue of supply will be the key to the success of refurbished high-tech.
Quality cannot be decreed any more than trust. To ensure this qualitative offer, playing the national card and the short circuit appears to be a guarantee of success: it is possible to collect the devices, restore them to working order and redistribute them without giving in to the sirens of relocation. The benefits are multiple: this patriotic card certainly guarantees the quality and the confidence of consumers, but it also makes it possible to limit the greenhouse gas emissions inherent in long-distance transport, while freeing our companies from their dependence on the American markets. and Asian, in terms of spare parts.
This voluntarism will allow genuine democratization of refurbished products among consumers who are still recalcitrant, by pulling the entire digital sector towards long-term sustainability. If all of these efforts are undertaken, the reconditioning market may even succeed in establishing itself as the locomotive of the green recovery, with many job creations behind it.