Bacon's Rebellion

Be Good, Recycle Your PC

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Even I get tired of arguing about tax hikes. For a change of pace, I invite you to contemplate the hazard posed by that old computer monitor sitting in your basement or the pre-big screen TV collecting dust in your garage. They contain toxic chemicals — don’t dump them in the trash! Be responsible and unload them at one of 18 electronics recycling events scheduled in Virginia this April.

If landfilled or incinerated, hazardous materials in common electronic products may be released into the soil, air or water. Televisions and computer monitors use cathode ray tubes (CRTs), each of which contain as much as 8 pounds of lead. Flat screen TVs and monitors contain mercury. Printed circuit boards and switches in electronic devices contain small amounts of chromium, cadmium, mercury and lead.

“Almost seventy-five percent of all obsolete electronics are still stored in offices and homes. This is a great opportunity to get rid of that old PC or VCR that has been collecting dust and know it will be responsibly reused or recycled,” said Computer Recycling Initiative’s Director, Carrie Dorsey.

Click here to find a recycling event near you.

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9 responses to “Be Good, Recycle Your PC”

  1. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Good idea. I’d feel a lot better about it if the stuff didn’t wind up going to China and being “recycled” in a manner that is environmentally unfriendly.

    It’skind of like the Oregon soft drink cans. Turns out they were being ground up and turned into substrate for leaching gold: a pretty nast process.

  2. COD Avatar
    COD

    Darn, they aren’t hitting Spotsy. I’ve got two dead monitors taking up space in my office.

  3. Will Vehrs Avatar
    Will Vehrs

    Jim, on behalf of the Virginia Recycling Markets Development Council and the Mid-Atlantic Consortium of Recycling and Economic Development Officials (MACREDO), thanks for plugging e-cycling. Such events are becoming more frequent and more convenient to more Virginia residents, although based on cod’s comment, we still have a ways to go.

    A well-used economic development tool is the incubator, typically an office building that is subdivided and provides subsidized rent and admin services to small business that have outgrown their garage or bedroom, but are too small for leased space. These incubators typically cater to high tech or “clean” service businesses.

    I have always thought we should consider setting up recycling “incubators” at landfills and transfer stations. E-waste and construction waste are two potentially profitable steams and nurturing small recycling businesses might serve both an economic development good and a public good. A person with a pick-up truck could start such a business pretty easily.

    The cost of a trailer or two and a covered space would probably be much less than equivalent office space.

    If we stimulated home-grown markets, we might not send so much to China, although I suppose anything we can do to curb the trade deficit might be considered a good thing in some quarters.

  4. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    That’s right. I know a guy who gets surplus building materials sorts and resells it. I’ve bought quite a bit from him and he apparently does a good business.

    The business itself is somewhat trashy looking. It appears that it is located on part of an old family farm, and the nearby houses are ones that have been spun off to family memebers.

    But if anybody else tried to duplicate it, I can’t think of anyplace in my county where it would be allowed, or else the requirements would be so onerous it couldn’t survive.

    In my home town, they once built an entire tanker truck for the fire department, out of stuff that came from the dump. We had really low taxes. The dump had well organized recycling areas located around the central landfill pit, and people had a good eye for things that others might want.

    Recycling is a really good idea, but it is hard to make it pay, and it has a waste stream of its own.

    What we need to do is to move the recycling process forward into the repair world. The Volkswagen Beetle was a terrible car, but it was eminently recyclable. I had one for almost twenty years and at the end there wasn’t a single part that was original. The entire body had been swapped out, the machinery several times, and the running gear many times. It was still running when I sold it, but if VDOT ever checked the serial numbers, I don’t know what would happen.

    The other thing we need to do is expand the deposit idea. In addition to having deposits on soft drink bottles, we should have them on appliances, autos and other big ticket items where they can do some good. The deposit would flow to the recycler who is the final user: this would make recycling profitable. He would claim the refund from the manufacturer. This would ensure that the user of a product pays for its disposal, and manufacturers would have an incentive to keep the deposit money as long as possible by building items that can be repaired rather than disposed of.

  5. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    In the case of foreign manufacturers, the recycling fee would haqve a similar effect as an import duty and could be collected in the same way, but without being called a tariff.

  6. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Why do some localities charge for the service while others don’t?

    Just curious.

  7. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Because, for the most part, it is a money losing operation, or at most marginal. Recall the story of mandatory newspaper recycling in the District. As a political city, they created so much waste product they flooded the market.

    If you want to look down the road, think about what is going to happen after we spend a few billion to meet the Chesapeake Bay waste water restrictions. Where are we going to put all the sludge that results? Once we stop putting it in the Bay, we are going to have to put it on the land. Then we will have regulations to prevent sludge runoff in order that we don’t pay for the same sludge creation multiple times. Eventually we will outlaw gravity so that sludge is prohibited from running downhill.

    Coming soon to a farm near you: two month’s worth of stench.

  8. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    As an engineer and a flinty New Englander, and a farmer, I spend a lot of time fixing old junk. I can’t stand throwing something away. Maybe some of it comes from growing up on an island where there was no place to throw it.

    My father used to say that garbage was like scotch tape. (Shaking his thumb with an imaginary loop of tape on it.) “You can’t throw it away, you can only stick it someplace else.”

    When I’m repairing something that was designed so it can’t be fixed, it makes me crazy. I want to go find some enginner and marketing guy an knock heads together.

    Here are a few examples. A rototiller with gears made out of free machining brass. Guaranteed to fail.

    A windshiel wiper motor installed in a totally inaccessible place under the dash. It was installed by compressing four little rubber studs into holes in the sheet metal, and sealed with a ten inch oblong flat gasket. When the rubber studs rotted away, the motor fell on the floor, followed by a torrent of rain that shorted out everything under the dash.

    A 1/4 inch diameter spring loaded shift lever detent that you had to break the tractor in half to replace.

    Every piece of household plumbing and wiring I ever had to fish through a hollow wall. Anything that can only be repaired upside down. A twelve bolt circle on a transmission housing with six hex head bolts and six star pattern bolts. Try and figure that out in the dark under the car.

    The ignitor for the gas range that costs 25% of what the range cost.

    What’s worse is, that because I’m good at this, people think I like it. Wrong. I hate things and I love flesh. I’m convinced that things are inhabited with Gremlins.

    It’s a vicious circle. The more stuff you have the more stuff you need to maintain it, like the Virginia Highways. It starts with a screwdriver, and next thing you know its a shopfull of air compressors, saws, welders, a forklift, an earthmover, a dump truck to haul the earthmover…..
    My wife takes great glee in making fun of all of this. Then I pointed out all he special purpose tools in her kithchen, and that is just for one job. She carefuly forgets all that when she needs something and it turns out that I have just the right framitz to manufacture a repair piece for her thing-a-bob.

    I’m convinced that we could solve our balance of payments deficits if we just passed must be repairable laws. Every engineer should be required to be a mechanic for ten years. For many of us our life has come down to buy it at Wal-mart and take it to the dump. Even if you buy it at the BMW or John Deere dealer it is no different.

    So, if PEC wants to make a supporter out of me, the way to do it is to start a campaign that ensures things don’t have to be thrown away, not one to recycle them at a loss.

  9. shaimon Avatar
    shaimon

    I work for E-Tech Recycling Inc (http://www.etechrecycling.com), an electronics recycling company located in Virginia. We recycle all types of electronics items such as computers, monitors, TVs etc. When I speak with people about the importance of recycling electronic items, they are very ignorant. I think more than anything, we need to educate people about the importance of recycling.

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