Eddie Phanichkul Featured on EBay

I was featured recently on eBay for our sustainability program.

For those that don’t know, I’m all about sustainability. Recently I was featured on eBay’s sustainability team’s website, www.ebaygreenteam.com. I’ve been working with Eco ReBox to further sustainability efforts. We purchased reusable boxes from Eco ReBox and started shipping them for all of our applications that had product coming back to our warehouse. We’re saving money and trees.

It’s pretty awesome. Check out Eco ReBox and the article, linked below.

When we decided to profile Titanium eBay seller MI Technologies, Inc, we were thrilled that the company’s business model is based on reusing what already exists in the world. But when we actually talked with their Marketing Director, Eddie Phanichkul, we unearthed a treasure chest of sustainable gems.

MI Technologies was launched on eBay in 2004, selling lamps and other parts for televisions and projectors, many of them refurbished. The company was founded by two high school friends who saw a business opportunity in eBay very early on. In fact, they got their feet wet on eBay when they were only 18 years old, selling video games and mp3 players back in 1999. Today, the eBay vets run their highly successful business online and off, with 120 employees, offices in the U.S. and Mexico, and products shipping all over the world.

So, what’s so green about TV lamps and parts? Well, when a simple part in a television set breaks, instead of buying a whole new set and getting rid of the old one, customers can order a replacement part from Discount Merchant (one of MI Technologies’ subsidiaries), send their broken part back, and voila: there’s a happy person watching Glee again. One better, Eddie and his team will fix the broken part and resell it, extending the useful life of something that would have otherwise found it’s way to a landfill. Eddie says they can fix up to 90% of the parts sent back to them!

But, you might ask, isn’t all this shipping back and forth is economically and environmentally burdensome? Enter sustainable packaging manufacturer Eco ReBox, who Eddie and his team partnered with for what they call “closed loop shipping” – incentivizing their customers to return the boxes by tacking a fee onto the price of the item, which is reimbursed as soon as the box reappears in the company’s offices. Eddie says that unlike a regular cardboard box, which can only be used a couple of times, Eco ReBoxes can be—and often are– used up to 20 times!

For those in the San Diego area, MI Technologies just became an e-waste recycler. In fact, Eddie says—with a chuckle—that the company’s competitors in states with poor e-waste recycling programs already ship their recycling to MI Technologies. And if you’re wondering what you can possibly do with those pesky Styrofoam peanuts, MI Technologies actually uses it’s San Diego office as the only drop-off site in the area – and then, of course, reuses them!

Via eBay

Update 3/3/2019 – Ebay Green Team is no more, so I’ve posted the entire article here to preserve it. Visit the WayBack machine for the link!
https://web.archive.org/web/20130328004544/http://green.ebay.com/greenteam/blog/Member-Profile-MI-Technologies-Inc/4612