As China's trade-in program is in full swing, the country's recycling industry has been growing.

Data showed that both the amount of recycling and disposal scale have increased significantly. In 2024, the amount of home appliance recycling has risen by 14.83 percent year on year.

"In 2024, China's waste electrical and electronic products recycling market exceeded 150 billion yuan (about 20.59 billion U.S. dollars). The total units of discarded home appliances are expected to surpass 200 million this year," said Zhu Liyang, president of China Association of Circular Economy.

Each year, there are 600 million to 700 million discarded phones in China. Most of them will be disposed by specialist agencies.  
They will undergo comprehensive checkup, and those with good quality will then be circulated to secondhand markets.
"Every day, we can dispose over 80,000 telephones. Their service life has been greatly extended," said Yang Yuxi, head of Beijing Branch with a mobile phone recycling company.

Some consumers may worry about the possible leak of their private information via secondhand markets.
But they can rest assured, as not only will their information being wiped with professional software, but their used phones will be physically dismantled by specialized disposal enterprises.

Then, useful parts and materials will then be collected by recycle agencies for reuse, Yang said. 

"We will melt down all the electronic chips in each discarded mobile phone and turn them into available resources. In the future, we will form a nationwide mobile phone safe recycling disposal model, and then eventually establish a national safe recycling and terminal resources reuse platform for electrical and electronic products," said Ke Yanchun, general manager of China Resources Recycling Group's Technology Innovation and Digital Intelligence Department.