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"eCycling" Pilot Program in 5 States and D.C.
Mr. Slippery writes: "Several /. stories have discussed the problem of disposing of electonic gear laden with hazardous materials. The EPA, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, DC, and about a dozen corporate sponsors have launched a pilot program to collect and recycle computers and electronics. The objective is to collect data to "develop a long-term cost effective system to remove computers (including
monitors & peripherals) and TVs from the municipal waste stream."
(My car is now loaded up with five monitors, 3 old HP RISC worksations, several partial PCs, an old TV, and various parts and pieces for the Baltimore County drop-off tomorrow...if any area geeks are looking to scavange old gear this might be a prime opportunity.)"
Toss out old unix boxen. I've been wanting a PArisc box for years. Don't suppose you'd be willing to ship?
Sometimes they really do need to be thrown out -- let's recycle instead of landfilling!
Is rosy; and her five sisters.
does anyone know a place that can take very old computers in or around cincinnati, theyre taking up too much room...
It's a shame these programs don't put stuff aside so that poor geeks (like - the really poor ones with hand-me-down 386's and the like) can get some old hardware.
:)
Most of these places are just pure break down and destroy. Which makes sense economically, but still..
Perltop - GTK / Perk Desktop environment
Fine Palm!!!
What the hell are these bozos trying to do, kill off hamfests?
The proper way to recycle this stuff is to take it to a hamfest.
If you are anywhere near FallsChurch, come to Broad St. There is a huge banner in the
middle of the road that will guide you to the exact location.
If you are in Alexandria, take Leesburg Pike and drive towards Baily's cross-roads, Leesburg
turns to Broad St. Stay on that (please go 25mph, fallschurch is over populated, it is a
residential area, and our cops are broke, hehehe)
For those of you coming from the other side of Leesburg (tyson's corner) just stay on Leesburg
and head towards Falls Church (aim at the Route 66 exit, if you have to.) and you will
land in Broad St.
One of the problems with capitalism is the utter lack of cern with what happens to a product after it has been used. _Every_ product should have its disposial and / or recycling plan sorted out before it is even sold. Anything else is to cohourt disaster with the earth's resources and environment.
DR. LUNIX TORVALDS TEL:234 8023132472 FAX: 234 - 1 - 7595586 HELSINKI-FINLAND.
Dear Sir,
I write you this letter of request for partnership which I hope you will give your urgent attention. We worked as members of the Operating System/Penguin Abuse Committee inaugurated by the present Democratically Elected Comittee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation headed by General Richard Stallman (rtd). We are empowered to deligently reviewed, re-appraised, scrutinized and approved feces payments to lunix users who executed *bsd devils under the past operating system regime and our work is almost concluded.
In the course of our work we discovered this fecal matter, which resulted from grossly over used toilets, which were executed for the Gnu is Not Unix Corporation (GNU) by a consortium of several Foreign Companies like
VA SOFTWARE, RED HAT INC SUSE GMBH AND A JOINT VENTURES OF MANDRAKE AND CALDERA GMBH FOR:
(1) THE EXPANSION OF THE FECAL NETWORK WITH LINUX USERS FECES AND DOWNSTREAM PRODUCTS DISTRIBUTION AND SUBSEQUENT EVACUATION.
(2) CONTRACT FOR THE TURN AROUND MAINTENANCE (TAM) OF THE VARIOUS PENGUIN FECES FARMS IN THE COUNTRY.
(3) THE CONSTRUCTION OF STORAGE TANKS FOR LUNIX PRODUCTS (SEMEN).
Amounting to the tune of 100 tons of Fecal matter but was over invoiced to 150 tons of Feces. And we deliberately approved these fecal deposits and all Lunix users have been paid with these penguins executed and since abused, leaving the large amount of Eric S Raymonds maginificent deposit floating in the escrow pool of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ready to be paid for the sexual services from the products in item number 2 as stated above. Before digressing further I would want you to know that our GNU General Public License forbids us from owning any money or having heretosexual relationships whilst in GNU service hence we are contacting you to be part of this transaction.
We intend to use your anus as a front to get the over invoiced amount of 50 tons of feces out of the BSD Sewers to a designated toilet by you. Not regarding your field of specialization (sphincter expansion) you are going to forward us with any name that we will claim executed the sewaging services in the turn around maintenance of the Penguin fecal abuse farms mentioned above. All logistics are in place and all modalities worked out for the smooth insertion of the feces within ten to fourteen days of commencement after the receipt of a semen deposit from you. You are going to get 25% of the feces by posing as the owner of this feces while my colleagues and I will get 70% to ourselves with which we wish to invest in Agriculture and Farming in conjunction with you and 5% will be set aside for the use of both parties for all excretions incurred locally and internationally during the realisation of this transaction, including toilet paper, as a matter of fact you are expected to take a sincere inventory of your toilet paper.
It is imperative to let you know that I am also a keen scatologist, with qualifications world wide.
Despite researches carried out to verify and ascertain your personality we can only move ahead if you can further assure us of your anal capacity, homosexuality and promise to help and treat this proposal with utmost confidentiality. We are men of proven integrity in our various fields who have put in 22 - 30years of feces in the toilets of our country, we are therefore averse to having our image and anuses widened. That is why we should acknowledge the fact that confidentiality is the key to the smooth insertion of this infection free transaction.
Awaiting your earliest positive response.
Best regards and remain blessed.
DR LUNIX TORVALDS
I R00z j00!!!!!
Is there such a place in Los Angeles? Need to get rid of two NCD terminals (yes, they do work, but the the display on both isn't the best). They're yours if you can pick them up. junkmail@whistlin.com
The Redundant Technology Initiative have been doing this sort of thing in my hometown of Sheffield, UK for a number of years now.
RTI is an arts group based in Sheffield, England. It started in 1997 with a group of artists who wanted to get involved with information technology, but didn't have the resources to buy computers. So instead they went about getting their hands on trash computers, finding new ways to be creative with old technology, then exhibiting the results.
Now RTI has accumulated hundreds of machines and has raised money to open a media lab, called Access Space where people can learn, create and communicate using trailing-edge technology. At last, after a series of frustrating delays, Access Space finally opened on April 6th 2000.
We had a fairly groovy Wireless Internet Workshop too at Access Space last November.
cogito ergo sig...
Throwing away an HP RISC? A pity. Give that stuff away, or trade something for it at TradeBoxen.
I'm not affiliated with the site, I just swapped some shit there recently.
It's better that it goes in the office than the landfill.
No sig is worth reading.
I would require that the maker pay the refund fees.
We could do Data mining with a shovel and dig up the landfills. Just think we could at last bring down AOL by a forced return of all those CDs they send out.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
We should be reducing our consumption of computing equipment, and thankfully huge performance gains in recent years allow us to own them longer.
Reuse is a great second consideration. You probably have very high standards for you computer's performance...but I bet you neighbor doesn't! GIve the damn thing away to someone who can make real use of it.
Finally recycle. A great first-step approach here would be to start a business that takes disposed of computers, strips them down and uses the parts to create ultra-low-price boxes that can be resold. For example - consider two individuals discarding PCs because of resource starvation in one aspect of their systems. Jimmy drops of a Pentium with a twenty GB hard drive. Ann drops off a PIII with hardly any disk space. Well, combine Jimmy's disk with Ann's CPU and you have the start of a PC that you could actually sell for maybe $200. Of course you would be obligated to cleanly dispose of the parts you don't use, but you get the idea. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried this.
waow!
When a site has a small bandwidth limit like this one, I think posting a link to it on slashdot should be considered a DDOS attack, and be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Everybody who thinks that people who THROW AWAY UNIX BOXEN should be banned from posting on slashdot, raise their hands.
Anyone know anything about places like this in New York? Preferably the Rochester area. I mean there are lots of computer folk up here, but no computer recycling I know of. It would help us out a lot if we could pick up some old boxen for servin' small time stuff.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Others may be able to make use of your old PC. There are many places arround the country, like Freebytes in Atlanta.
This sig intentionally left blank.
I see a problem with cost. Proper disposal of a computer in the United States normally costs between $5 and $10, compared to $1 or less in third-world countries.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
People in New Jersey and New York City might be interested in the Trenton Computer Festival next weekend. Lots of old junk to buy/sell/barter/gawk at. Recycling is good, but if someone wanted to pay for your old junk, that's even better.
When I owned my computer store I used to get tons of computers that people would just give me that I wouldn't buy from them I had the whole basement fl of antique computers. You could put a free ad in your local paper and people would probably give you more computers then you could handle.
http://Lenny.com
A few years ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john a big beautiful all-American football hero type, about twenty-five, came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was "straight" and married -- and in any case I was sure I wouldn't have a chance with him.
As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy young ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as a man's wrist.
I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a heavy rimmer and had lapped up more than one little clump of shit, but that had been just an inevitable part of eating ass and not an end in itself. Of course I'd had jerkoff fantasies of devouring great loads of it (what rimmer hasn't), but I had never done it. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of the world's handsomest young stud.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?
I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled. I've found since then that shit nearly almost does.
I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big brown cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was the donor of this feast wasn't there to wash it down with his piss.
I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit.
Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
I often think of that lovely young guy dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful shiteater.
for older computers, such as the vic-20, some of the really old apple 2 clones, and atari or TI machines, i used to go to the Mile High Flea market in denver. they always had really good selections on the old stuff. last year I picked up a vic-20, cassette player, vicmodem (300 baud even!), and a couple games on tape for $11. then I found a 1541 drive a cople booths over for an additional $5. every time going down there I have seen lots of computers from that era. I picked up a mac plus there once for $14 too :) They have 386s and crap too, and once i found an AT&T machine. it ran some kind of unix. the salesman said it was DOS, but... he pronounced DOS like DOSE :)
www.ban.org
includes photos, a pdf version of the report, and you can even order a 23 minute video.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I live in Baltimore County, and I've been waiting for something like this. My house has had more roomates than I can count in the past 6 years, and we've collected the electronic junk of people who skipped town, joined the military, or otherwise departed and left us to take care of their garbage. At one point, we had 6 VCR's (including 2 Beta decks) 2 TV's, 4 tape decks, 1 reciever, 2 record players, and a few Nintendo 8-bit decks. None of them worked well enough to use in any capacity. We tried to find some way to get rid of them in a non-destructive way, but since they were broken, donation was out of the question. So there they sit. Except for the 486 and 386 that we took a couple golf clubs and baseball bats to. THAT was a fun afternoon ;) ... ;)
I can't say how happy I am that this is now available, and in my home town no less! and its even cooler that Baltimore County got mentioned on the front page of Slashdot
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Here in California it is being proposed that a recycling tax be placed on new computer equipment sold in this state. This isn't like some deposit fee that you get back if you recycle the item either.
Yet Another Confusing Buzzword, from people too lazy to do more than stick "e" or "web" in front of some mangled, ambigious collection of syllables. Here's the real definition
"E-cycling: the inevitable, cyclical, occurance of ill-defined buzzwords formed by mindlessly attaching the letter "e" to some word or pseudo word. See websturbation."
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
As a service ... let's list existing organizations and known recycling methods for computers and other electronics. As techies it is highly in our interest to see the gear we use and love not overly burden the environment we live in .. as techies we should be aware of the effects our actions, the toys and machines we play with etc, have on the environment around us. It's not just a matter of use it and toss it, like the electronics makers would like us to believe.
...
Here's what I know of
http://crc.org - in the SF Bay Area, recycles computers and related stuff, refurbishes whatever it can, donates it back to charity service. Giving equipment to the organization is itself a charitable donation (for which I was about to take about $2500 in donations in this years taxes).
If you are a Fremont CA resident, BFI operates a drop-off center on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8am-4pm. There's a $10 fee for dropping anything off. They accept limited types of equipment (personal computer, portable TV, console TV, plugin stereo systems). Phone is 510-657-3500.
The Recyclery, at the Newby Island Landfill, this is at the I-880/Dixon Landing Road exit, the place where there's a big BFI landfill. They take stuff the Fremont dropoff center will not take. THere's a fee, and they're open mon-sat. Phone is 408-262-1401
- David
My friend is off scavenging for classic Macs and such. Can't beat the kindness of people who know nothing about how their 2-year-old machine can be used for something other than WinXP...
Nationally (Internationally, actually), there is the Share the Technology site which has a great database setup for registering materials available to give away or wanted (primarily by non-profit organizations/NGO's.)
Then, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA... there is what is known as, well, actually there are SEVERAL efforts. I represent one called the Please Take M.E. (M.E.=Materials Exchange) which is a co-operative membership unwanted materials exchange run under the wing of a non-profit charitable organization called CARP, the Creative Arts Resource Project which accepts unwanted materials of MANY different kinds.
CARP is also involved in a collective which is known as the Philadelphia Reuse Collaborative which is an organization of organizations that include a number of organizations that recycle/reuse old computing equipment, give it away, etc.
CARP is ramping up activity majorly right now, and is actively seeking any potentially interested parties, especially in getting the word out to science teachers, art teachers, and hobbyists of all the fun geek and nerd kinds.. robotics, electronics, etc etc etc. so please get in contact or pass on the word to anybody in the region you think may be interested. If you dream of being SRL, Negativland, or on Robot Wars, Junkyard Wars, etc. then you should get involved with CARP.
AND if that doesn't sell you enough, then how about the fact that pleasetake.org is currently hosted on slackware.com? It's gotta be cool. :D
try this
and if anyone wants 14" monitors or 3/486's contact me. free except for shipping.
help out.
Meanwhile, in Finland..
I think there's something to be learned elsewhere as well. So far, if I want to get rid of for example monitors that I don't have time or skill to fix, I have to either pay 5 euros a piece to get them into some place that strips them into pieces and dumps them away - or hope that someone will take them for free and make use of them.
The thing is - I figure any country with at least some history in computers and nerds(wait, isn't that almost every country) needs some place that manages this. The reasons are obvious and it seems to me that it wouldn't be a huge waste of money and it might be a nice step to enviromentalism.
I'd like to see the people working in these kinds of places to include a few with some hardware knowledge...
"Wanted: geek to play around with second hand hardware. Benefits: all the old skool junk you can carry"
The end result would be larger towns having a large hall somewhere at the edge of town where rents are cheap, with a lot of hardware stuff in some sorts of categories. Maybe a few trucks to drive around the country across smaller places, gathering stuff now and then. Some of it will be reused by people wanting to play with stuff. Perhaps the staff might work to fix some things that could be sold for cheap or donated to some place that needs them, like poor countries, schools, clubs etc. Of course some would go to waste, but properly recycled.
The key thing is - don't just gather the materials, gather the potential uses as well. For example, a 486 or even an old pentium might be useless for most places, but consider the geeky uses for such things, consider places that don't have any computers. Value in dollars or euros? Little. Value in practical use? Large to very large.
They have an automated shredding and separation system for electronics. Such systems have been around for a while. A combination of grinders, screens, AC and DC magnets, cyclones, and float tanks separates out ferrous metals, nonferrous metals, dense plastics, and low-density plastics. Once separated, the metals have some value, the high-density plastics have some marginal value, and what's left is no worse than household waste.
CRT recycling is still a problem. There are very few plants that can cut up a CRT and recover the leaded glass for use in making new CRTs.
See, now I read the title, and I thought the article would be a recycling program for Palm Pilots. ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
Computer components are no more dangerous, and in fact significantly less hazardous than many other electronics that are disposed of in much greater quantities. REALLY!, all of a sudden we discover this? NO
This is just a new cause for a person to head a new organization which will be receiving grants from the government and from computer companies who will give money to show off good public relations.
I picked up a moniter and a nice keyboard a few months ago. They go well with the 486/66 that work was throwing out a couple years ago. (Actually I picked up two of them.)
Last week there was an Epson printer, but I was in a hurry, and didn't have time to look at it. I might have taken it, and replaced it with my HP Deskjet 500. :^)
I'm hoping for a 17" monitor next!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
if any area geeks are looking to scavange old gear this might be a prime opportunity
Be careful if you decide to root through the recycling center's collection of old stuff. Many municipalities consider the property their own, making it a criminal act to pilfer from the recycle piles. My own town refuses to let you walk off with recylced computer junk due to hazardous waste laws: It would be like letting you browse through all the discarded pesticides and chemicals, picking the ones you want to take home with you.
eCycling is my Specialized Ground Control Comp A1 equiped with hokey spokes, Garmin GPS, Bike Brain and a 1,000 song sound system.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I've got a few old cases that I don't want to deal with. I'm guessing that these can go to some regular kind of recycling or disposal center since they don't have all the nasty chemicals that pcb's and other components have in them.
What kind of places would take them?
-prator
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
This has been happening for a while now in Cary, NC.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The company that does most of the "ecycling events in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area is http://www.subtractions.net and your not allowed to pick through the old computers at all.
What abou those whose router is a P200 found behind an office building? Whose Dreamcast uses a monitor yoinked form a dump? 1/3 of his riad array is replaced evey month using hard drives thrown out by others? Whose dos nostalgia mashine was also recoverd from a dump? Those with all of their components heatsinked using p1 heatsinks? Please, don't let them pass that act! In addition to increased hardware costs, this will remove technology from my home. And I am not cheap, mind you. I am just a student whose finances are very limited.
I will recycle all Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11, PDP-8, and other PDP computers that are shipped to my recycling center in Oklahoma. There is no fee for this service, and I will gladly provide a signed, notarized receipt that absolves my customers of all liability for their recycled machines. You can rest assured that your machines will be processed properly and will not simply wind up in some landfill.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Do yourself a favor and check out a new month-old internet site called Serence. Since April 2002 they have had a free / no ads / no spyware download for your Windows desktop called Klipfolio and this thing is great. According to the site statistics 3400+ slashdotters have already downloaded the Slashdot Klip and after joining them today, I can see why. (No, I don't have any personal vested interest in this, I just think it's cool.) The Slashdot Klip stays on your desktop and downloads the XML feed from Andover/Slashdot containing current article headlines, alerting you when there is a new one. Klips from a few dozen other founding news sources with XML newsfeeds are also available in a scrolling, dockable, resizable, skinnable package. In the lower left corner of the previous link you can suggest a new klip feed to Serence you'd like to see - a great thing for you to do, the more sites that use this, the better for all of us. You can even start up your own personal Klip feed! Rack up your favorite sites in one desktop package and you are really in control...click on a headline, up comes the article, click on the site symbol, up comes the home page. Like any dot-com, Serence's success depends on market penetration and this is one idea I think deserves to be slashdotted so it has a shot at succeeding...
Offtopic? Not really, the article I'm posting under went out as a Slashdot Klip headline. And what good is maxed out karma if not to risk it in spreading the word about a cool new Slashdot feature?
Up here north of San Francisco (and in the city too) it is now illegal to throw away a monitor in your trash. You must take it to a recy10cin center AND pay a $15 fee for them to dispose of it.
There are also place that will take older computer stuff too...laptops are free to turn in, but things like dot matrix printers cost $5-10 to turn in. And large items like copiers are $2 per pound.
Keep it running, re-use..recycle as last resort. And buy USA made if ya can..might just save my job, or maybe your.
Microsoft and the BSA will be inspecting all PCs sent for recycling to make sure that the original OEM CD, manual, Quick Start booklet, registration, hologram, CD-key sticker and cellophane wrapping are included, so they know which PC owners to sue for using the products they purchased.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
For those of you in the Atlanta metro area, check out ZenTech for local computer recycling.