“When the time comes, disconnect the main flex cable.”
Besides being a short guy named Tom, I never felt I had any sort of Mission: Impossible credentials until I donned safety googles and got handed a screwdriver and plastic scalpel at what’s thought to be the UK’s biggest phone recycling factory.
Fixing the screen on a Samsung handset isn’t quite cutting wires on a nuclear bomb, admittedly, but for someone whose DIY experience doesn’t go far beyond putting toppled Lego back together, it was quite the thrill.
Having already used a screwdriver no fewer than 18 times to get into the device’s complex interior components, the next step was removing that aforementioned flex cable.
These are what connect up some of the phone’s most important features, like the touchscreen, to the motherboard – and this phone needed a new one.
It was a relatively basic task, though not one I was trusted with enough to perform on a real customer’s device.
In the time it took me to remove those screws, the technician sat in front of me had likely fixed a few of the more than 900 devices processed at the Ingram Micro Lifecycle hub in Norwich each day.
The 34-year-old facility, with a floor big enough to hold 20 tennis courts, has around 800 employees.
Many are highly-trained technicians, deployed at stations with dedicated equipment for everything from realigning a phone’s broken camera system to replacing those all-important flex cables.
A technician at work disassembling a phone. Pic: Ingram/Virgin Media O2
Facility ‘purpose built’ to recycle phones
Kevin Coleman, the facility’s fourth employee back in 1989 and now one of its most senior leaders, says there are “hundreds of technical functions” going on at all times.
“The facility is purpose built to industrialise high-volume processing…
