California Considering Recycling Fees on PCs

Jeff writes: "It looks like two US senators are introducing bills that would impose recycling fees on new computer systems sold. These bills look to cover every high-tech product a consumer might buy, including computer and video monitors, desktop and notebook PCs, and handheld gadgets."

Comments

Donations and Recycling Programs

[Styros]

PEP National Directory of Computer Recycling Programs

You can go there to see what options you have on recycling computer parts in your area.

We already got these taxes in Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Belgium and we got a tax on every electronic item sold, this is called the Recupel Tax, this tax is used for recycling. The rate is different on each category of items, for example a mobile phone is about 0.5 but a computer is around 10. I personaly think this is a good idea.

Re:lucky for me..

[BradleyUffner]

"Charities, schools, and third world countries would love to receive computers"

Before the current job I have now I used to work for a school district. I can tell you that we absolutely hated receiving donated computers from people. We ended up with rooms fill of 8088s and 386 with no hard drives. 99% of all computers we received that way were totally worthless, and just given to the school so that the owner could receive a tax break. This was last year too, I believe the best computer we got the whole year was a 233mhz Pentium. We spent more time, and money trying to get old donated computers working again, or just trying to find SOME use for them. Public Schools (at least where I'm at) are not allowed to just give the computers away to students who need them. They must be used by the school, or sold at auction. We couldn't even just throw them out because of the state's insane school inventory tracking system.

Re:Why oh why can't they do things right.

[caesar-auf-nihil]

Its not quite as difficult as you think to recycle electronic equipment, although there are some difficulties.
In Europe, the law around electronic equipment works as follows. The company that produces the equipment is responsible for its care, use, and disposal before the sale and AFTER the consumer is done with it. While the consumer owns it, its their responsiblity. But when the consumer is done with it, it goes back to the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). The OEM then disassembles the equipment, and recycles what it can. If the plastic can be reground and reprocessed, that is done. Glass (where possible) is melted down, all metal components are melted down as well (or reused for the same model or other model electronic equipment. Screws, bolts and brackets for example). Difficult items to recycle include circuit boards (epoxy plastic, metal (some of it toxic), silicon and semiconductors), cathode ray tubes, and sometimes the plastic.

What the European OEMs try to do is reuse what they can and incenerate the rest. If the plastic cannot be reused (off color, decomposed), they'll just burn it up and recycle the energy gained from combustion. However, materials that don't burn (semiconductors, silicon, etc.) are left as slag in the incenerator, and also are concentrated in toxic elements which can leach into ground water. How to deal with this waste is currently a big sticking point for the recyling of electronics waste. There are some refining techniques that one can use to separate out the elements in this inorganic "slag", but, they're quite expensive, and, there currently is no desire/regulations in place to reuse this slag material. Electronic circuit board OEMs and chip OEMs don't want to use material from this slag for fear of contamination may ruin finely tuned electronic properties, which are often affected by minute impurities. Part of the reuse taxes that EU citizens pay goes towards research to solve this issue, and set up an infrastructure to get the whole recyling system to work.

There are systems in place to get this to work, so you just have to give them time to catch up and get fully implimented. It took 10+ years to get PET and HDPE (#1 and #2 plastic) to the level where it was widely implimented and cost effective. Electronics recycling has probably only been going on for 3 years now, so give it time.