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Twice Used gives broken iPhones a second life (pictures)

The project, launched Friday on Kickstarter by a phone and screen repair specialist, wants to make modern handmade household products out of our stories of "clumsiness and everlasting remorse."

Nick Statt
Nick Statt was a staff reporter for CNET News covering Microsoft, gaming, and technology you sometimes wear. He previously wrote for ReadWrite, was a news associate at the social-news app Flipboard, and his work has appeared in Popular Science and Newsweek. When not complaining about Bay Area bagel quality, he can be found spending a questionable amount of time contemplating his relationship with video games.
Nick Statt
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Home button bracelet

This bracelet made from recycled iPhone home buttons is just one repurposing of the Apple handsets that Chris Koerner can't fix with LCDcycle, his phone and screen repair business.

With his recently launched Twice Used initiative, the Alabama-based business owner hopes to give new life to iPhones unfit for repair by fashioning them into art, be it jewelry and ornaments, or blending them with functioning furniture like clocks and coffee tables. His Kickstarter campaign, launched Friday, hopes to kick off the project and make it an integral part of his company.

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iPhone earrings

Twice Used came about when Koerner, who owned a repair business called Phone Restore prior to founding LCDcycle, noticed that a steady percentage of iPhones that came through his stores were unfit for restoration.

"I noticed that only about 75 percent can be recycled -- the other 25 percent were just being stacked up in our warehouse," he said. That's because those unlucky devices with broken LCD portions of the screen weren't suitable for Phone Restore's process, which involves heating up the screen to remove and ultimately replace both the adhesive between the layers and the broken layers themselves.

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Shattered glass picture frame

"There are three parts to an iPhone screen: the LCD; the digitizer, which is the touch recognizer; and then there is the glass," Koerner explained. "As long as the LCD is working, it can be recycled. But you can't fix a broken LCD."

So Koerner thought to utilize the growing stack of unfixable iPhones in his warehouse after a local artist used his stash of devices to coat a University of Alabama print with shattered iPhone glass.

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iPhone clock

The Kickstarter campaign is less a one-off project than it is a funding initiative necessary to kick off more high-scale production.

"We don't need to buy the glass, obviously. We do need other material like cork," Koerner said, "and a milling machine to make stainless steel."

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Front plate tabletop

Twice Used offers a coffee table with a top fitted with more than 100 iPhone front plates, in white or black, for a $300 pledge.

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Shattered glass coaster

To solidify the phone shards within the glass, Koerner and his team use clear casting resin to fill the stainless steel case fitted with a cork bottom to smooth out the surface.

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iPhone kitchen set

Of course, Twice Used is Koener and his team's way of monetizing the unfixable devices instead of sending them through Apple's Recycling Program.

But it's also a clever commentary on the utility of devices after they've lost their core functionality. "Each screen tells a story -- a story of clumsiness and everlasting remorse," Korener writes on the Kickstarter page.

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Back plate coaster

Koerner and his team currently have around 20,000 pieces of whole or partial devices to work with, but they hope to partner with fellow repair shops to source more material down the line.

Ultimately, Koerner would like to expand Twice Used into its own full-fledged business, and he aims to spin off employees of his current company to make that happen.

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