Refurbished cell phones are opening doors to wireless communication in much of the developing world, where a new cell phone might otherwise be prohibitively expensive, Blumberg said.

"Sometimes, you have someone in a village who has a cell phone and rents out time," he said.

In the U.S., service providers offer cell phones at big discounts and make their money off service contracts or sale of minutes. In the rest of the world, customers generally pay the full retail price, then separately sign up for service.

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Despite the focus on flashy, high-priced devices, the world's big cell phone manufacturers also compete fiercely at the low end of the market with entry-level handsets that sell for $40 to $60. By contrast, a refurbished phone might retail for about $30, Newman said.

Refurbished phones may account for just 3 percent or 4 percent of the overall market, Blumberg said. Even so, they help keep prices down and spur the spread of wireless access, Newman and others said.

"The affordability of a new product has increased a lot," said Nokia spokesman Keith Nowak. At the same time, those for whom $50 is a lot of money may want the security of knowing they're getting a freshly made phone.

Today, about 80 percent of the globe's 6.5 billion people live in an area with cell phone reception, according to Newman and Blumberg. And along with education and health care, the spread of cell phones is a leading spur to economic growth, Newman said.

The March of Dimes, which does research and education on birth defect prevention, turned to ReCellular when it decided to launch a cell phone donation program several years ago. The drive brings in about $160,000 a year.

ReCellular tracks incoming phones by donor and generally pays charities a share of the resale price they bring.

"They are an excellent company to deal with," said March of Dimes fundraising executive Bob Perry.

When the Canadian Association of Food Banks decided to set up a cell phone collection program, it shopped around for a company to handle the phones, said spokeswoman Tamara Eberle in Toronto. The umbrella group for 2,000 food banks and other agencies across Canada has collected about 100,000 phones through its Phones for Food program that began in 2003, raising about $140,000.

ReCellular executives made a strong impression in many ways, from their willingness to work closely with a relatively small phone collection program to their commitment to recycling all possible materials that they handle _ from wires to scrap paper and cardboard.

"This is a company that has a lot of integrity," Eberle said.

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