I don’t know why I thought it would be difficult but as it turns out it was actually very simple.
My eldest son has been harassing me for ages for his first mobile phone and as much as I didn’t really want his first phone to be smart phone, in the end I figured that it was better for him to have my current phone (it is 6 years old and apart from the battery life still works perfectly) rather than to go out and buy a new one. So I found myself a 2 year old refurbished phone from Envirofone (which comes with a 12 month warranty), had a new battery put into my old phone at my local iBroke My Gadget store, ordered him a SIM card and finally ordered myself a beautiful plastic-free phone case (made from wheat straw) from Wave.
After a few hours of research, photo/data transferring and the all important parental control setting, I now have a very happy boy.
There is actually a great choice of secondhand phones available online and so for those of us that can live without the latest version of a phone (which I actually think is most of us), we can really easily help to reduce our impact on the planet by making the mobile phones that have already been produced work for us for longer.
My next job now though is to send off my other old phones to be recycled so that the valuable materials can be reused and the harmful substances can be disposed of properly. If they weren’t so old I might have even been able to get some money for them!