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Metech Offers to Recycle Your Mac
Rosyna writes "Apple now allows the general public to recycle their Apple branded computers. It only costs thirty US dollars, too. The dumpster is still cheaper. More details at Apple's page and Metech's page."
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I plan on hanging onto my G4 for quite a while.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
People would recycle Macs? Why? I've never seen one actually wear out. I'm using a 13-y.o. SE/30 running NetBSD at home. My 10-y.o. Centris 650 still boots, and I'm donating it. That's recycling. My main machine is 5 now, and will probably serve me another 2 years before I can upgrade, and then it will probably become a file server in a corner somewhere, or another donor/loaner.
You don't throw it out unless it's dead. And with Macs that takes awhile.
Constitutionally Correct
The dumpster is still cheaper.
... or at least, if you could put a monetary value on them, I'm guessing it would be more than $30.
Sure, for the person who's throwing the computer away. But the long-term costs in human health and environmental damage are high
The trick is that there's no simple way to pass these costs back to the person who puts the computer in the dumpster. [Insert treatise on externalities here.] If you're feeling socially responsible, it's still better to recycle, and far better still to put that old machine to work in some extraodinarily geeky project which will later be featured on Slashdot.
(Speaking of which, has anybody got Linux to run on an Apple ][+ with 48k of ram yet?)
I've got an rev. b iMac (the almost-original bondi blue style) with a dead monitor. As near as I can tell the electronics are all fine, but without a working display it won't boot. I'd love to get it running again, minimallly as a "hidden in the closet" server, or better still by finding someone with another dead iMac with a working display where I could merge the parts together into one working machine.
But since just fixing it doesn't seem feasible (a new CRT has been quoted to me for around $500, so that's not an option), and I haven't been able to find anyone for the "franken-mac" idea, my fiance has been trying to get me to throw it away instead, and sooner or later I'm sure she'll have her way on this one.
If it comes to that though, rather than toss it in the trash, I'd rather pay a service like this to recycle it if I could -- the toxins in modern PCs are *nasty* and worth trying to recycle or dispose of properly. Tossing it in a dumpster really isn't the best idea, as a major recent reports (and several related news articles) have highlighted:
There's a reason that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" has the terms in that order. It's better to re-collect the production materials to be used in new products than to throw things away & need more raw resources, but it's better to stretch out the lifespan of existing products before giving them up for scrap at all. Even beyond that through, it's better to consume less at the outset than to stretch out the life of things that you maybe didn't need *or* recycle.
So yeah, it's better to reuse that old working Mac, but when the time comes to give it up -- and that time *will* come, sooner or later -- then it's better to dispose of it responsibly. Recycling isn't necessarily a very clean option, as the report in that last URL illustrates, so the longer you can avoid that the better.
And if anyone in the Boston area has an old iMac with, say, a dead motherboard, let me know :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The simple way is to put a $30 tax on the initial purcahes of a new computer.
Why should someone who holds on to a machine for a long time subsidise those whose dick goes limp if his machine is 6 months old?
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Probably one of the best uses for old Macs (if you are a Mac true believer) is to turn it into a web/FTP server. Outfit that sucker with a fast ethernet card, throw some Apache software on there and get a static IP address. Do anything besides throw it away! And who in their right mind would pay someone to recycle it? The cases alone are worth at least $30.00.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
The dumpster is *not* cheaper.
Because somebody is going to
have to monitor the groundwater,
cleanup the site...
Were that I say, pancakes?
"The dumpster is cheaper"
Not only is it unethical, it's also ILLEGAL in many places to do that. And in some places, can even come with relatively stiff penalties that will definitely be more than $30 if you get caught.
Plus...there are lots of not-for-profits that'll gladly recycle your machine for use...even come and pick it up, and somebody gets to benefit from it. This is "as cheap" as the dumpster and does someone some good.
Or maybe you're just a silly dumpster troll?
Except, why should everyday consumers be the ones paying this $30 tax? The way I see it, the huge businesses throwing away 1000 486's along with CRT's, or the workers who take them home and then throw them out (initially thinking they got a great deal) are the real ones polluting.
... you should pay this $30 tax because you've purchased something that will, sooner or later, be an environmental hazard. If you're a sensible and/or moderate person who only buys one computer every four years, you only pay $30 every four years. If you're a big corporation that buys 1000 CRTs, you pay $30000 for that. Seems fair to me.
Ummmmmm
The $30 figure here is open for debate -- as is the decision of whether the fee goes at purchase time or discard time (probably the former is easier to enforce, but the latter captures the actual cost better), or even directly to the manufacturer. The point is, it should be in the chain somewhere, in a uniform way for everyone, much as the costs of raw materials are in the chain now. If you introduce something into the space of economic concerns, the market should theoretically react to it. [Insert treatise on tort law here. And possibly refer to somebody who actually knows something about economics.]