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Office Depot Wants to Recycle Your Old Computer
IcerLeaf writes "CNN reports that Office Depot will happily recycle one old electronics item per customer, per day, from July 18th through September 6th. Qualifying electronics include computers, monitors, printers, scanners, fax machines, digital cameras, cell phones, and TVs 27" or smaller. Office Depot and Hewlett Packard will be splitting the bill. What's coming out of your basement?"
Two winters ago I had finally hit a breaking point of cruft. 11 computers weighed my personal space down, sparc servers and stations, sgi indigo2s and dumb terminals, countless x86 machines in varying states of decay. Sounds like you? In a panic, I updated my slashdot sig announcing that my lan was for sale, more of a joke to myself, a poke at my own sloth. Amazed at an almost immediate response with a serious inquiry, I reconsidered my offer and realized, "why not"? What had that pile of crap done for me? It caused me anguish, it made me think every single night coming home from work, "one of these days, I'm going to clean this place up". And so I went ahead with it, and sold everything on my lan for 400 dollars. I got 1 new machine with it, and 10 months later, an ibook (with other money) I haven't looked back since. In that time I've started, and completed, many of the mundane backburner projects that were always on-hold for seemingly forever. My point to this post is, if you haven't used a thing, and are keeping it because you think you might, why not just get rid of the thing (and this, a chance to do it properly, and for free!) and not let it vex you, sitting idle in the corner, calling out to your procrastinations ... (admittedly, 2 of the 3 boxes i mailed were lost or destroyed. the third, the cables, was received a-ok. the buyer was upset until i told him i had insured them. somewhere, there's a little old lady with a bright purple indigo2 full of potting soil and philodendrons ...)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
thats where I get rid of all my computer junk.
I have two defunct laser printers, probably at least one dead monitor, and some other misc. stuff to come out of my basement. Stuff that frankly is too expensive to ship to sell on ebay.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Last fall, I sent over 2 dozen old 486 boxes (had grandiose plans for a renderfarm a few years ago) up to a recycling place in NH. They took them for free. The rest of my crap goes into the electronics bin at the dump.
Recycle your used tech with 5R Processors! They are the nation's largest computer recyclers and put a lot of the tech to work either through refurbished sales or donations.
Read jack phelps dot net
One a side note, if you have anything that works, it is possible to find charities that will accept old equipment (not too old, but not necessarily working.) You can write it off. I donated an old G3 last year and took a $200 write off.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can I cut my 36" TV in half?
I mean, now that it's dead and all ;)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Cool. With my truck load of stuff. 1 item per day could take me past labor day. :)
1 Sun IPX with 19" monitor
1 Sharp 'luggable' XT
1 no... that would be EVERY modem i own.. just to show off my 10mbit line!
Everything else in my basement is also dead but not a computer. .
People throwing stuff out when I could use something besides the 1994 era Pentium I have right now.
What's coming out of my basement? Heck, I'm going to go and stand in front of these stores and try to take the old stuff from people who are going to recycle it so I can add them to my collection!!
:-)
I'm still looking for that old atari and timex sinclair...
you insensitive clod.
Can't send 'em to the dump, due to all the lead in the CRT. A half-dozen monitors will be leaving my basement. Also a Compaq 386sx and 386 (upgraded to a 486DX2 via an Overdrive chip), and I'm sure I'll find some more stuff. Anybody want an original IBM PC async serial card?
This is great news.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
While I think this is great of Office Depot, I think re-implementing some of the older technology to maybe some younger siblings, cousins, Boys and Girls club, etc. could also be good. There are still a lot of people that can afford these types of things. So, before you go recycling that 486 at office depot, thing about re-deployment!
...I need to get rid of. Right now they are in boxes in my living room floor taking up space, and I think the landfill charges to take them. I just might stop by a couple of times and get rid of them.
Don't dispose of your old monitors. They have lead and other hazardous materials that we really don't want in our groundwater. Please take this opportunity to have them disposed of properly.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Stop filing Federal Taxes, then ignore their mail and phone calls. Oh, they'll take everything.
1) are they trying to get us into the store(s)? (hoping we'll do some business whilst we're there)
2) are they trying to do the public a service (by getting the possible toxic materials out of the dumps?
3) They're hoping (x)% of the materials turned in with have (y%) of redeeming worth, either directly, for sale on eBay, or as a donation to a local school as write-off donation?
It is impossible to get rid of monitors, at least here in Washington state. Even working monitors. Schools don't want them donated. Salvation Army and similar charities don't want them. You aren't allowed to throw them in the trash. All you can do is sell them, if you can find a buyer who actually wants one, or pay $10 for environmentally correct disposal. ($10 is for a 14" monitor; bigger ones cost more.)
So, this is a free service that is worth $10 or more if you need to get rid of a monitor. Cool.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The companies would not disclose how much their program will cost, or how they're splitting the bill.
There's no cost. There's a lot of money to be had in the recycling industry -- especially in recycling electronics. They sound like they're just in it for environmental and humanitarian reasons, but they're in it for their wallets first and foremost.
I'm definitely a collector.. but I constantly feel this desire to have more and it just won't stop.. I have probably around 60 systems and alot of it is old but some of it is pretty neat like my TRS-80 model II (mmm 8" disks) and the PCjr and a Kaypro IIx and pretty much everything I have works also. Have 10 computers on in this room right now, 12 are plugged in... although my parents are starting to not like it very much and dust is unmanagable to clean off that much stuff I'll gladly take more.. except if anyone wants to buy a small stack of working dot matrix printers I have a bunch that I don't use.. maybe ill take advantage of the officemax thing for them..
Seems like enough people are looking for junk on eBay that one could very cheaply dispose of an item there, only need to worry about shipping. Apart from that, there is a chance for a porfit, however, in the event of actual junk, listing fees would quickly bog one down, especially in cases where they have a lot of junk to rid themselves of. Other than that, it's a great idea, but it seems like a bit of an irony that it's offered for free, instead of offering a rebate with a return or something, as with cars, and just about everything else. If it weren't free, we'd see a lot more CRT's in the dumps, poisoning the water, etc. It seems like the program shouldn't be a net cost for the companies involved, if they are actually recycling (as in reusing components) instead of disposing (as in, CRT's in the dump... or in a hazardous materials dump, which would cost more money).
"Don't be so quick to toss out your old PCs, fax machines or digital cameras"
Where I live, Toronto, it's actually against a city bylaw to throw anything with a PCB in the garbage. Pretty sure lots of people do, however. But's its good to see Office Depot and HP offering consumers something better to do.
-psy
If someone could find enough storage space then those old machines could probably be combined into a fairly powerful grid computing array or linux cluster. The main problem that I forsee is that at some point the really old x86 machines take up more physical space then they are worth in terms of additional computing power made available to the cluster. However, if someone had some wherehouse space that they were not using then it would be an interesting project and it just might convert machines that are now useless by themselves into a worthwhile computing resource.
The problem is that I can't help thinking that someone out there might like a Sony NEWS, or an old Sun SPARCstation with a HUGE (but small in capacity) SCSI hard drive! :)
Need to know where to go dumpster diving?
I want to keep some stuff, like kind of a small a museum for my kid later on, or just for the desperation midnight frontend server build, but with 8 sun lunchboxes, enough compaqs for a small business and more ISA/Tokens, and Ethernet cards than computers it's time to realize my dreams of folding/farming/rendering have only yeilded me the fruit of of a title: New-age-digital packrat.
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
heck yes!!! we had a computer recycling day at school this year and I picked up a few systems, as much as they would let me take...
The proper question may be who is coming out the basement.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
It's nice of all of us to give our old computers and other electronics to them, but what, exactly, will be done with them?
Are they truly being recycled? Will they be melted down for reusable metals or just scavenged for useful parts and the rest sent to a landfill?
If they're just going to landfill, I can do that at the curb...
Get friends and family to take in an item aswell as yourself. That way you can get rid of much more stuff in a smaller amount of time.
It's always good to dispose of old equiptment properly (or even recycle it).
Silly rabbit
My wife pointed out that ebay is one of the most powerful resources in recycling that we have today. I'd have to agree. I don't know what Office Depot is doing with these machines, but wouldn't you rather have your old gear to go someone that can make use of it?
For example, I recently got a "new" used car. It came with tired I didn't particularly like. I replaced the tires in fairly short order, and sold the old ones on ebay. They were a mis-matched pair. One pair I sold and because of shipping difficulties I ended up losing about $5 on it. That's less than the $20 I would have paid to take them to the dump, which is probably what would have happened if not for ebay. And now someone has a pair of tires in good shape that they can make use of.
The other pair I sold for $90, because they were not an "off brand".
I've been putting a bunch of my junk up for sale. Things that aren't really useful to me, but are to other folks. Plus, once in a while you come across the rare things like the Dreamcast Ethernet adapter that I sold for twice what I paid for it, or my classic HP calculator which looks like it will sell for almost twice what I paid for it.
Usually, I first offer it to local folks in my Linux Users Group. Selling is much easier that way, and you don't tend to have to muck around with shipping. ebay makes shipping pretty easy though.
So, remember that recycling isn't just about giving things to the "recycling centers". If you can get it to someone who can use it, all the better. If you can recover a few bucks in the process, all the better.
Sean
Recycling is better than throwing out, but I recall it only usually saving 20% energy. Reusing, on the other hand, is much more efficient.
My dog ate my sig
Boy will my girlfriend be happy when I finally get rid of that old flux capacitor I have sitting around. I recently upgraded to a 2.42 gigawatts flux capacitor for my time travels. Thats twice as good as the original! The old one has been rendered useless.
Must be the same "bill" as the one they have for recycling(gee, what swell guys) those $20 inkjet cartridges.
Seriously, corporations don't do jack unless they think it'll help them sell their wares. If Office Depot and HP aren't making money by giving all the junk to a recycling company, they're expecting to steal away customers from Staples and IBM, with good will. They're probably doing both.
Sorry, but touchy-feely posts about corporations doing "good stuff", like sponsoring breast cancer research(a favorite for companies looking to increase female customer numbers, such as BMW), disgusts me. Yes, the byproduct is "good stuff gets done"- but don't go on about them doing it from the bottom of their hearts or because they -care-. Corporations don't have hearts, and neither do boards or executive officers. They do it because they want to sell more stuff and want the PR points- it's pure greed.
Please help metamoderate.
I live around Boston, MA, and my roommate has been trying to get rid of an aging VGA monitor he bought on eBay for like 12 cents. After he found out it wouldn't fit on the shelf he wanted to use, he dumped it on the curb, only to learn the city wouldn't take it; they told him to take it to the dump. So of course, a week or so later, he goes to the dump, expecting to have to pay them to take it. The dump people tell him, "no, the city will take it for free; just leave it on the curb. We *can't* take it here." So this Monday, he leaves it on the curb, a little bit frustrated but happy to see it go.
What do I see while walking to my car this morning? His monitor, lying alone on the sidewalk, the only item left behind after the garbagemen visited.
So, thanks, Office Depot!
P.S. Go Earth.
Okay - I've got my tinfoil hat squarely on - and tongue in cheek.
:0
It occurs to me that this could be an evil plan to remove older technology from the potential hacking marketplace.
Think about it: everyone throws away their old computers (perfectly suitable as Linux workstations/servers) - forcing people who want to build low cost servers to buy new machines instead.
Taking this further into the realm of the strange, the move to force adoption of DRM technologies would get a boost in the arm from the acquisition of new computers due to the lack of used alternatives...
Okay...maybe not... (takes tinfoil hat off and slinks away)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
eBay beat 'em to it, thanks to eBay I rarley let a PC get so old I won't use it any longer, my upgrade cycle is a little more frequent but a whole lot cheaper.
Oh yeah? Well, make an offer on a TS1000 with the 16k ram upgrade then :)
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Alas, the nearest Office Depot retail location to Boston is in Kingston NY.
Oh, well.
> My comment can be quoted whenever, wherever, so long as you bloody well provide attribution! >
Twice a year up in Princeton, Minnesota they have a machine gun shoot (www.tankrides.com). Now, regardless of what your opinion of guns are - pulling off 100 rounds from an M-60, AK-47 or an M-16, I tell you, nothing compares.
.50 cal through it.
I stockpile old computer equipment to take up to the shoot so I can put a few rounds of
There's nothing like pulling the trigger on a Barrett 50 cal sniper rifle and watching that old server that gave you years of grief explode.
It's beautiful.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Oh my, don't tell me such dirty things ;-) Be careful with what you wish!
Excuse me for asking, but I'm honestly curious. Are you really a woman (girl?) who likes to mess with men's heads, or are you actually some sicko freak who thinks it's funny to lead a bunch of guys into thinking you're female?
If you're in the later group, I really don't want to know why you do it. If you're in the former, however, it raises the question of "why?" Do you really enjoy the attention that much?
Get a bunch of friends to help carry the stuff in.
1 per day per person...
=Smidge=
Wanted:
Beboxes
Amigas
Atari STs
HP PArisc systems
SGI Systems
Apple 2s
Apple Lisas
Any Xerox computers
IBM RS6000/AS400 (especially microchannel based)
Sun Ultrasparc
Any Alpha based systems
Any Cray systems
Any ATM622 nics
Any HIPPI equipment
(Any unusual nics for that matter)
Any Vaxen
Email me!
Interesting that this was announced the day that Office Depot begins selling Apple computers......
Fellowship 9/11
In Ottawa, we have this place known as
Computer Recyclers.
They only take computer parts though. No fax or cell phones. They sell the stuff for scrap metal but you wouldn't know it from there site.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I have an old TV in my basement. I estimate it's from the 50s, but I don't know when for sure. I'd estimate that the screen itself isn't larger than the 20", but the whole box is probably three feet wide by two feet tall by two feet deep. I'm bad at estimating weight, but it's probably weighs more than our semi-modern 27" CRT Sony.
Will Office Depot take this? It's only 20", after all. ;)
"I've got to stop masturbating! It makes me too lazy! Stop it, Albert. Stop it." -- Albert Einstein
Ever tried? People will buy anything -- and if you make sure they know that the buyer pays S&H, you're in the clear.
The article says only the continental U.S., but does anyone know if the same thing will be happening for us Canucks?
I'm starting to feel guilty using mine as a boat anchor.
Ever wonder how many people trade in their perfectly good machine because it is full of spyware and viruses due to an unpatched Windows installation and a direct DSL/Cable hookup? There are certainly people out there that think that a 2 year old machine is worthless even though all it needs is a fresh install.
Hey, I checked out your journal: did you know that "Live Speed On Ice" was released on CD as "Billy Sheehan: the Talas Years?"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
With you "Moore's law" and your Radeon 9800's. You consumeristic, built-in obsolence society is a scource on Mother Earth!
I suggest you all watch "Yank Tanks"[*] to see how people in the rest of the world make do with what they've got instead of squandering their lives in the pursuit of material things!
[*]Actually, I do reccommend this film. I could very well envision these people living in some sort of William Gibson futureworld underclass, carefully nursing along long-dead technology and using things for purposes other than their intended use.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm willing to bet that there will be decent (not amazing) stuff being given up. 2 megapixel cameras, older P4/Athlon systems, decent stuff of all types. They should maybe try to refurbish the better stuff and donate it to schools or low-income families. It sounds like it's just going to be sent to the recycler to be melted down.
And of course... cue the obligatory "In Soviet Russia, $subject $verbs you! :)
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
i'll be the one going to the manager of my local home depot asking if i can root through the things they've received in but not recycled yet, looking for treasures.
Pea...tear...Griffin? Yea, yea, Peter Griffin.
After any resellable parts are removed the vast majority will be shipped to India, Pakistan, China, etc. Technology exists to reduce ewaste and any other waste to raw elements such as carbon, etc. however, it would be to easy and make too much sense. I have interested Indian investors but no U.S. investors. Looks like the Indians will be making money on our 'out sourced' ewaste as well.
The better...
This seems the nnnth try to get old hardware platforms out of the way for new plans...
Every year I get more synical about companies trying to help consumers...
It is simply not true that they help us, period.
I refuse to believe it is in all our interests...
Throw it in a garbage bag.
Throw it in a garbage can.
Smash it up and put it in a garbage can. If sharp encase in a yard waste bag (large paper bag) and put that in a plastic bag.
Good bye, spherical 15" and 17" monitors from the early/mid 1990s. Good bye P90 and P166. Good bye junk I've wanted to get rid of forever but didn't want to pollute the world with.
Office Depot & HP announce plans to create largest beowulf cluster ever...
If you want a good argument for recycling please stare deeply into my manteats. You will be hypnotized and submissive to my liberal will...
now i can finally get rid of that VoodooPC and my 20" lcd monitor i got in December...you know, 128MB of vRAM was SOOOO last year! In all seriousness, I will definitely take this offer up on my truly vintage crap.
We have geeks up here too! We're cold geeks but geeks nonetheless.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I want the HUGE (but small in capacity) hard drive!
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
i usually use my electronics till the wheels fall off (till their beond repair), then they end up as hand-me-downs to other family members if they have enough function left to do anything with
We're moving halfway cross country and I decided to take the old laptops, 1/2 ton 17 inch monitor, extra cases, scads of DIMMs, SODIMMs and SIMMs, CPUs, fans, ISA/PCI/??? cards, cables (network, power, serial, parallel, and "huh?"), AB Switch boxes, KVMs, and other items in my "yesterday and someday" collection to Goodwill.
I'm too busy for eBaying it away. Office Depot taking "one" personal electronic device a day would be a huge waste of time for me, for the parent and for most Slashdotters, I'd imagine.
My wife said, "I told you so." And, she did. Your advice is sage.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Cause I have a pile that I can't get rid of its all deemed HazMat my the local trash haulers and nobody wants it unless I pay them money to take it...NOT Gonna happen...I am beginning to understand why empty lots get covered with various stuff like this, not that I'd ever do such a thing, I care about this little rock we live on a bit more than that.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I just got a new monitor to replace the old one I had that went out of focus (and caused me headaches when reading /.).
Now do I take it to Office Depot for evironmentally friendly recycling, or Plan A, which was take it out to the desert and bash the hell out of it.
Maybe this is a response from HP to prevent cruelty to laser printers ala Office Space.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I don't have a basement you insensitive clod!
-Gandalf23@work
The problem is that I can't help thinking that someone out there might like a Sony NEWS, or an old Sun SPARCstation with a HUGE (but small in capacity) SCSI hard drive! :)
I have a few old SPARCstations (a 2 and a Classic). They rarely sell on eBay and their value is less than the cost of shipping. Their ratio of power consumption to performance is poor compared to modern devices. No one wants these until there are so few left that they are museum peices.
Nah. I'd rather donate. The battered women's shelter in my old time regularly ask for old cell phones. If you contact your local police department they'll probably tell you if they accept donations. If not, there's always salvation army.
The Netherlands - and I'd imagine the same all across the globe, more than likely.
;)
We have a saying here "Die raak je aan de straatstenen niet kwijt".
I have a P133 and two P233's, fully outfitted.
e-bay ? Forget it - shipping would be more than I could fetch for them.
fleamarket ? Forget it - people would pay even less, and in the mean time I have to sit around all day long and haul the gear back and forth.
donate ? To whom!? Schools don't want piss-poor slow computers. 2nd hand shops know THEY wouldn't be able to sell them either.
Charity - trust me, even in the poorest of countries they could get a new computer cheaper than hauling the gear there.
Friends/family - I think they'd give me a dirty look!
Trash - not allowed!
Large trash - at a fee!
Buy new, and turn in old gear - a, ha! YES! my one option.. when I go and buy the new computer, the store I'm buying from *has* to accept my old computer in return. Unfortunately, that still leaves 2 other computers.
The same applies to all kinds of other crap...
Scanjet 3c scanner, for example. I missed out by 1 day on a good deal to get a color scanner/printer/copier combo for 100 euros less if I'd turn in my old scanner. Doubt they'd expect a 3c, but that wouldn't have been my problem.
Of course I already have a new scanner, but at I could either sell that, or the combo thing, for a profit.
So short of any such actions here.. I think I'm stuck with the hardware until I say "f*ck it" and just pay up to the government to be allowed to dispose of it.
Of course... if anybody in The Netherlands is interested in the cra^H^H^Hnostalgic hardware, they're welcome to contact me
This past weekend, at their headquarters, Motorola ran a free electronics recycling and donation drive. No fee, no residential requirements, simply a nice and friendly day of recycling.
I never realized how much computer crap I had until I started putting it in my car. When I filled the car I realized how sad that really was.
But I was really glad to be recycling it. They even took my printer and the keyboards and put them in the donations pile.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Since Office Depot just announced they are going to be carrying Apple computers, does that mean I can trade in my stuff and get Macs? Niiiice... :)
whatever happened to Geoworks? Weren't they going to take scrap computers, put Geoworks on them and donate them to third world contries?
I have been debating the idea of recycling computers. Basically I would take, or buy very cheaply, old computer parts and put them together to build new systems. Then I could resell the systems cheaply, just enough to cover my time, say $20-$50 or so. Or I could give them away as a tax writeoff.
Does anyone want old computers though? A Pentium 800 is perfectly fine for using MS Office, but most people think they need 3Ghz machines and don't buy old systems. Maybe I can give them to nonprofits?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
The city should offer free or low cost recycling for toxic garbage. Otherwise they will dump illegally.
Many cities around me have added bag limits for trash, what ends up happening is illegal dumping, or people putting their trash in front of others houses.
Few things are more annoying then having 2 bags of garbage in August putting them out, and not having them picked up because someone threw their garbage in front of your house.
On another side note if you have anything that works, put it on ebay or slashdot and you can find someone who will at least pay shipping to take it off your hands.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
People,
I'd like to take this moment to ask if anyone of you is aware of the serious problem that alot of major co.'s are merely transporting the computer dumbs to places in Asia, especially China. This time, I wonder, again if we're seeing another case of letting the Co.'s bear the pretty name of helping us recycle while at the end just throw these garbages to Asian countries.
Also, the article specifically mentions Dell's recycling efforts:
"Computer makers such as Round Rock-based Dell Inc. have stepped up programs to take back old PCs"
No mention of HP, though, so maybe HP is just doing a better job of publicizing their program, despite being about half a year later than Dell.
And think what would happen if you sent them someplace other than France!
*rimshot*
Thank you!
Then again maybe they could pop over to an online grocer and order some food. Too bad we're not still in the dotcom collapse. Some of those outfits were accepting rocks and berries for payment near the end.
Or get Sally Struthers on the job. Yes, folks, for just pennies a day, you can sponser a Khoekhoe script kiddie and keep him hip deep in Doritos and Mountain Dew. Why just last week little !Hukwe here cracked the IMF database and struck a blow against the imperialist bacon-eaters of the West.
Get Pres. Bush to fund it. Just tell him the Bushmen are relatives.
*rimshot*
Oh! Pow! Thank you!
--- Ban humanity.
Cutting it in half would merely create two 36" boxes with half the depth. Unless...
Nothing. I repair and reuse all electronics. Why - because I can.
and on teh sux0r as well...
uh huh, and how many more non-DRM computers are being produced today than are being destroyed? Because you know, I cannot load the operating system of my choice on a computer I buy today, so much DRM!
Nifty little thing, I have 3. One of them, I've managed to get a Palm foling keyboard working on, but I really wish I could make a laptop thickness proper keyboard for it, that would fit on top. Z80 was a hell of a CPU. I plan on writing some custom firmware, and doing a serial LCD display on it too, maybe even a meg of bankswitched ram or a 256M compactflash.
And then, get it all running off a few 9volts so I can have a cool laptop, not this Dell piece of shit. Too bad that 802.11 is such a power hungry thing, or it could have wireless too... (IRDA maybe?)
I'd give you a buck for the ram upgrade though..
Me too on the 'who cares?' Or at least, I don't care. I have stuff that's been sitting in my basement, just taking up space--I've been meaning to get rid of it, but to properly do so requires me to pay money--between $25-40 for monitors & CPUs. This gives me a way to get ride of my junk for free. If they can work it out to make money off of it, then it's a win-win. And presumably whatever they do with it is better than people trowing them in landfills without any processing.
Vote Quimby.
Tossing out old computer stuff.
You know I always thought that's what the trashcans at the local apartments were for.
Or for extra fun.. Clean up a dead 21" monitor and sit it on the side walk and see how long it take for someone to run up and run off with it.
Dell and viewsonic Monitors don't seem to last too long so they always look nice and new when you set em out.
Hmm, and since there's no way to check, I guess you could say "per location" too. Bring your friends from one "Office Depot" to the next until it's all gone. Hopefully you'll be done in time to buy them lunch and everyone will be happy.
RE: opportunity to solve that whole Yucca Mountain fiasco
once and for all.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
If I could figure out how to get linux to use a smartcard reader via the parallel port, then I could get rid of three old computers. Otherwise, I'll have to keep that old Windows 95 box until I break down and get a USB reader. At least, I get to get rid of two old computers.
Depends on the sparcstation. Personally, I'd love anything sun3 or earlier, and I'd even consider later stuff. At the moment, only have 2 ss2's, which aren't much. Maybe Santa will bring me a ultrasparc this christmas.
Woh, that's a good idea. I doubt anyone will have anything cool, but maybe some idiot will recycle an old Mac.
Ah crap, I have one of those collecting dust already.
What do I get out of this deal? I read the article, and apparently NOTHING. I'd rather sell an old printer for $5, then $0.
Geez dude, move to a safer neighborhood. And follow-up poster who says it takes 2 hours with the sun out, you're scaring me. For the love of good, buy the Greyhound ticket and head to someplace safe, like South Dakota. :^)
They will just go out and resell your old stuff after its been checked out and cleaned up.
Why just give money to them? there are lots of people that cant afford new stuff, sell it to them.
Or give it to yourlocal school/children's hospital/etc and benifit some needy people while taking a tax write off..
What a scam.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just last weekend, and took a busted TV into a repair shop. I'd like it to work, but I don't need it. The guy said $50-70 to repair (not even close to worth it for me) and $30 to dispose of. I didn't call our municipal waste disposal group (I'm sure it'd be cheaper) but this will at least save me 30 bones.
You know what?
It is all too infrequently that we see major corporations doing something like this; not just kicking in 1/10% of revenues to charity, but leveraging their respective competencies for social good. This is the best kind of corporate responsibility.
If you're like me, and vote with your dollars whenever a company angers you with poor customer service / irresponsible behavior, the more fun and more effective upside is to drop those $ when you see someone doing something right; I would hope that all you Slashdotters needing some Post-Its or stylii or what have you pick them up while you're there; a boost in same-store revenue will ensure that we see them doing this again. (Rather than having these pitched into cyanide vats or roadside ditches in SE Asia.)
Nowhere does it say that greed cannot have beneficial side effects.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I'm always happy to raid an old box for its CD and floppy drives, which seem to last like mad, which takes a few bucks off of a new whitebox build (though admittedly now I've got about 5 CD drives and haven't built a whitebox other than my 533 Celeron).
But other than those no-brainers, how do places chop up boxes? At this state, I can't imagine them being much good other than the aforementioned drives and as scrap metal -- and it'd seem the scrap metal would take a while to remove. It's not like an old car; this would take some effort to recycle. Any links to places that recycle the contents appropriately or is this really just a PR move?
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
ENIAC
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Recyles monitors and some other stuff -- for each monitor you bring in, you get a 10 dollar gift card.
It should be worth it if anyone was just gonna toss it/take it to OD anyways.
if (greed == good_stuff_gets_done)
printf("Why the f*ck is this a problem again?")
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
In many places, if you live on a busy enough road, especially in a college town, and you leave something on the curb, it's considered a free offering to whomever wants it. Tables, chairs, and couches are often recycled to other students this way.
For god sake I want/need that 'junk'
I'm not even a hoarder, but p166+ machines are gold. Strap a big hard drive + $10 NIC + linux = excellent file server, streaming videos, : P *drool*
Also give me your dead microwave ovens, the transformer is sooo tempting.
Don't put this stuff in your trash or give it to 'recyclers/dumpers'. Let me pick it up, or if out of area, others like me!
This topic begs the question, "will Office Depot recycle their old tech products still sitting on their shelves?"
From my experience, both Office Depot and Office Max are terrible at keeping pace with the rest of the tech market offerings. When Best Buy, CompUSA, and Circuit City have all cleared their shelves of old product, I've usually been able to go into either OhMax or the Depot and find the stuff still sitting there, under a lot of dust of course.
"Look, its the Palm V!"
"Wow, I didn't know 3Com made Palm products!"
Of course, that is a tad bit of an exaggeration, but not by much!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I listed my copy of Sphere on DVD (hey, it came free with a DVD player a few years ago!). Minimum bid 50 cents, $3 S&H. No bids. Relisted. No bids. Gave up, not worth screwing with.
I've had some other crap go wanting as well.
Hehehe.....and if they ever throw out a big SPOOL....now that's just great coffee/dining room table material. Goes perfect with the orange velour couch you find....
College room decorating at its best. A spool...obnoxious couch...and walls decorated in 'early American rock poster'.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ever been to a train trussel? Thats one place you can dispose of a monitor. Also comes with a loud bang at the end.
"If it has screws, it was meant to be taken apart."
Hell, not only do I have the games, I still have BASIC, PILOT, and probably LOGO somewhere...
Say it with me now...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
I'm not sure about computer recycling, but most recycling is bullshit.
#1. The tech is OLD. It will fail. Why should they spend $50 for a replacement power supply when a brand new box is $199?
#2. The tech is SLOW. Again, a new box costs $199 and runs 10x faster than the old stuff.
#3. When they finally do buy the $199 stuff, they'll be stuck with the recycling costs of your old stuff.
Of course, none of this matters if you also give your time and expertise to keep it running and so on. Those older machine can make great servers and firewalls, if you will set them up and maintain them.
Seriously, corporations don't do jack unless they think it'll help them sell their wares.
Sweeping statements like that are generally wrong.
Corporations are not Borg entities. They are made up of individuals. Sometimes the individuals can successfully push the company into doing some Good Things, and guess what? Those individuals might not be the souless, calculating evil bastards you seem to think they are.
It's true that corporations often do good things that might in some way benefit them. That's called "doing well by doing good" and I don't have a problem with it. You shouldn't, either.
Corporations don't have hearts, and neither do boards or executive officers.
It's healthy to be a bit suspicious of companies; don't accept their press releases without a grain of salt. But you sound like someone who has gone overboard the other way. All corporations are not the same, and everyone who works for a corporation is not necessarily evil.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I thought recycling electronics junk just meant they put the harmful heavy metal ridden stuff on ships and dump it off in Asia where yenless moms walk around (barefoot?!)exposing themselves as they bash in monitors to get slighty valuable components they can trade for a small amount of $$. Meanwhile people downstream drink noxious water.
Something like that. Do they have a new way of doing it now?
I guess that's better then filling our landfills. I mean we don't want EverYbody exposed..
I'm a bit confused here
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
You just hide it in other trash. Its then somebody else's problem.
They want parts from your old products (which aren't in production anymore). They will recycle what they can't use.
Comes off as environmentally friendly, and may prevent some of the new laws in the works as well.
But the ultimate thing they want is access to the parts. You help fill their toolbox, they get rid of your garbage.
I wrote a paper on Environmental Impacts of Technology Waste for anyone interested. It's a general paper discussing the issues from an environmental point of view, rather than a pure geek or business point of view... though written by a geek.
It's a general read, no serious background needed, not to technical. Just a general FYI I did for a gen-ed biology class last semeseter.
My problem is when people misattribute why the "good stuff got done" to goodwill. "Oh, XYZ's CEO cares SO MUCH about cancer research that they donated .01% of their annual profits to (insert charity here), which they were able to write off as a tax deduction so it really didn't cost them a dime. Oh, bless their hearts."
Oh, and by the way- you may think it's amusing to write "code" to express an opinion, but it's not(especially when you clearly get the programming concepts vs. language constructs relationship wrong). Learn to express yourself properly. Code is for computers, language is for humans.
Please help metamoderate.
Does anyone have a good place to recycle old used-up batteries, (AA-size, not car batteries)? Instead of the obvious: tape them to the inside of a '486 case and lug it to Office Depot.
They also have a program (ongoing?) where you get a free ream of recycled paper for turning in an empty ink-jet cart.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
True, if we are talking old commodores and PC-XT's It's its not worth the trouble..
But when people donate useful items it IS worth the 12 dollar an hour ( $30 is way too high for a entry level tech, at least in my area ) to clean them up.
I also have be part of many a donation project at a previous employeer and I have always made sure they were useful, useable, and 100% functional before they left the door...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In other words, "Let's get as much of this crap as we can, right now, and then offer incentives on the small portions still out there."
This is your daily cynicism. You may now return to happiness.
sig not found
There's a funky odor coming out of my basement. Damned in-laws.
xScruffx
A long time ago I bought a Syquest EZ-135 external drive and a *lot* of disks for it. When those disks became impossible to get I bought an internal Zip drive and a *lot* of disks for that. Now, like everyone else I use CDs for offline storage and all of that media is empty and unused. I still have the drives too. I *should* throw the stuff out, but it cost me a small fortune and it is as good today as it ever was.
I have the stuff in boxes in my garage.
Also, I have a *lot* of VHS tapes I used to tape old movies off the Late Show, AMC, etc. Now I am converting all of those tapes to high quality DivX files, two or three CDs for each movie. The tapes, no longer needed, also go to boxes in the garage. I can record over them, of course, but I have way too many for that purpose. You can generally donate prerecorded VHS tapes to library sales, but nobody wants used blank tapes.
Eventually I want to take my LP collection and convert them to CDs too.
And don't get me started on my *large* collection of prerecorded BetaMax tapes.
If these services do not exist, then I'll just take a hammer and saw to my old equipment and pack them into my garbage, piece by piece. I figure that over a few pickups my equipment problem will be gone. Sure, it's not environmentally friendly, but what choices do I have if I can't take advantage of a limited-time deal?
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Pity.
Looks like us Canadians will have to make a trip across the border.
Time for some target practice...
Just call them and they'll come to your house and take away old TVs and computer monitors. Costs you nothing, and no heavy lifting!
u sw aste.asp
This is better than Somerville next door, where you have to pay them and visit 2 different locations to drop off your stuff (go to one place, buy sticker for $15, attach sticker to item, bring to dump).
http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/hazardo
-EvilMagnus
Funny, thats how we got our living room table coffee table...
About 1 week before end of the school year , It was beat to hell and back, lots of different paints on it, from green to yellow... Big Ol' "FREE TO GOOD HOME" sign was taped on it, and it was sitting next to the dumpster outside of the apartment complex... Ugliest table I'd ever seen.
Me and My (now) wife took it home during the summer and made it a fun project to strip it, stain it, and varnish it...
Now, it has a beutiful oak glow, under about 10 layers of varnish, and is almost impervious to anything we've dropped on it... AND is looks GREAT! Total cost, about $10 for stain, $10 for varnish... +/- labor and some sandpaper and scrapers... And it is enjoying its new home in the middle of the living room in our NEW house... Never thought I'd have that table still around when I first saw it...
It's amazing what you can do with some of the junk you do find...
Now, Hardware wise.. I've got some old mac 5400's, a Mac monitor, old 15" monitor, and Lots of old Tandy COCO stuff... Maybe I'll pitch it all execept the COCO stuff... too many good memories.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
So that's where it came from!!
I'm actually to the point where I don't even like to manage my home LAN anymore. My current BSD firewall/inet server box has a disk that's slowly crapping out and I can hardly make myself do the work of syncing a new box up with it. I'm tempted to move my domains to my ISP and be done with it.
Stuff is a curse.
when I left Oregon by giving them to my ex-employer for their lab machines. They were more than happy to take them off my hands even if I did quit. :-)
--Rob
just what would those items be worth to you? I believe there are 2 old ataris and a sinclair in my parents basement collecting dust.
Seriously, corporations don't do jack unless they think it'll help them sell their wares.
I suppose that at the Fortune 500 company I've worked at for 22+ yrs, that that's the reason they've sponsored:
1. Local races supporting cancer research, and children with brain damange
2. Annual creek cleanup
3. United Way...every year
4. Matching funds donations to numerous charities (I've written many personal checks that were doubled up)
5. Etc.,...I'm sure if I spent ten minutes, I could triple this list.
Yes, they're in business to make money, but to insist that all that stuff is done just to sell our wares is nothing but crap. I personally know a couple of VPs at major companies, and my dad was a business owner...they are REAL people, and they didn't all get there by being cold hearted SOBs.
Just another day in Paradise
If only from the knee down of your right leg is 50 pounds you need some serious adjusting of your current diet.
I have a considerable amount of broken computer and electronic equipment, but leaving it on the curb for someone to pickup and discard in a landfill runs counter to my goal of eliminating the waste. But Office Depot's legitimate recycling program could ultimately end up polluting some river in China or India with lead, cadmium, etc.
Note that the US is not one of the signatories to the 1989 Basel Convention which establishes guidelines on the export of hazardous waste. Therefore, the US can export hazardous electronic waste to other countries for recycling. While countries which sign the Basel Convention (including China and India) are not permitted to accept hazardous waste from non-signatories, it's a profitable business. Brokers from South and East Asia will happily "recycle" shipfuls of dead monitors at rates cheaper than the estimated $25 per unit.
The problem is that the recycling procedures in China and India pollute more than merely dumping the material in a landfill. This article notes the common procedure of burning piles of wires to collect the metal--releasing dioxins and covering the city in toxic ash.
So forgive me for wondering if "free" means that the cadmium from my cordless telephone or the lead from my dead 27" TV is going to end up eventually in the South China Sea and my tuna fish sandwich.
If anyone has any 2500 series Cisco products they're looking ot part with let me know
now that I know someone wants all the stuff i've packed in my old MB boxes, I have reason enough to keep it all for another 5 years atleast! My ISA graphic cards aren't going anywhere yet! Neither is my Cyrix 50MHz chip! Neither is my half broken Atari tape drive! Hey, the Atari still works, that's hooked up to the t.v. it's got atleast 10 more years. 4 1MB memory chips that cost me over $200? ...from my cold dead hands...
Speaking from experience, this stuff will end up in a 30 foot rented dumpster just outside the store. Drive by your local OD, see a long trash bin? Take a look inside. Wood furniture, steel shelf scrap, ooh! it's the ink and toner carts we claim to recycle. This is just an occasion where it's a huge rented dumpster. Imagine the stuff getting tossed more discreetly on a daily basis, in a smaller closed dumpster up on the dock. If it's in the way, takes time away from the sales floor, or looks junky then it's going in the trash.
Office Depot was a decent company to work for, but they have the same problems any retailer has.
Sales forecasts and competition can drive payroll into the dirt. No money to pay for the time you need to do things properly. Employees must work harder and morale gets lower and lower. Office depot stores commonly cut payroll weekly to meet profit forecasts. It's the easiest expense to control. OD competes with Staples, OfficeMax plus the uber huge Walmarts and Target.
It's about time and money. If you've got 2 guys for the sales floor- who are already responsible for two other positions like cash accounting or receiving, the tasks without checks and balances or obligatory screaming customer will not be done correctly. The one or possibly two members of management are also busy backing up the sales floor, or being crucified on group conference calls with upper management as to why they can't meet statistical goals.
Bah, that pile a) looks messy - our GMs will give us hell, b) is in the way - Receiving area is too small and they can't work around it, c) takes too long to process properly - you'll catch hell if another customer shouts "Hello" in the middle of the sales floor while you organize, wrap, box, label and ship these items for recycling. Maybe it's the ever popular "Hey I shop here all the time, come on.. take this truckload off me today. I didn't know it was one a day grumble grumble, this is OD's fault. -tirade-" -Erm, okay. Right to the dumpster. This occured pretty much daily when empty toner or ink would get you a free ream of paper in return.
There are dedicated, environmentally conscious employees who will spend their -own- unpaid time getting this stuff done correctly, but to the rest who might see it as a burden imparing their audited fuctions, it goes out the receiving door and in the dumpster.
If you want to be 100% sure that your efforts are worth it, take it to some of the other recycling centers mentioned by previous posters or try to find someone who can use it.
On a related note, I will also be accepting items for recycling. The only stipulation is that they brand new with receipts. And no refurbished crap either - the, uh, recyclers hate that stuff.
Anyone in Austin Texas want to be owned by a pair of Sparc 5s? 2 working machines, one cannibalized for the other. Debian is on one of them, haven't turned them on in months. Email me at matthewhray at yahoo dot com. If you actually develop for a free OS I might give them to you for free.
F.O.Dobbs
Unless you are absolutely sure that you have completely sanitized it. We have all seen reports here and elsewhere of banks/companies who have sold formatted hard drives where confidential data was still recovered.
Sounds like a great source of free data for office depot - now when you get email from them on your old email address you hardly use you might think twice before you hand out hard drives or fax machines with all numbers programmed in ;_)
FragHARD
FragHARD or don't frag at all
http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/hazardousw aste.asp
Then just give the City a call, and they will come and collect your old TV or monitor *for FREE* from your home and recycle it.
-EvilMagnus
... we have the Transfer Station, which collects all our stuff and trucks it away to dumps far from here. The station tries to recycle as much as they can - especially stuff like appliances, building material, plant material for mulch, hazardous stuff, etc... you drive in and there is a 1/4 mile drive past huge dumpsters, each marked for unique types of trash. I have been known to take my geeky out-of-town visitor friends up just to view the spectacle of metropolitan waste collection.
There are always stacks and stacks of Mac LCs and LC2s stacked at the PC recycling station, but never an FX (snif) or a IIci...
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I have a Sparc 5-170 (yes one of those Sparcs) and an Ultra 1 in the basement providing firewall / file serving etc. I love the fact that you can manipulate the MAC addresses in the OBP. That has come in handy more than once, when I needed to swap out the firewall box and didn't have time to sit on hold with the cable modem people.
I kept one lunchbox - and IPX - for sentimental reasons, but dumped the rest of them. It was just too crowded down there.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Will office depot be doing this here in Canada? Here in Toronto I go to http://www.hitechrecycling.com for recycling....
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Heh, I think I have that sinclair sitting in a drawer somewhere. Haha.
they're expecting to steal away customers from Staples and IBM,
Never mind good will. Just getting you in the door makes it likely you'll buy something while you are there. Such as their floppy disks, the insides of which make a good decoration for cubicle walls. :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Where can I find information on getting a palm folding keyboard going? I have one for a visor which I am led to understand is the same keyboard with a different connector. I want to set it up for use in my car... I did a lot of googling but there are so many old review links and old (dead) sales links on google that I couldn't find anything useful.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's in YOUR basement?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I don't have a basement, you insensitive clod! I have closets. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Um, some of us still decorate that way, you insensitive clod!
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I'd be happy to "recycle" someone's old laptop if it works. A year and a half ago I had the good fortune of finding a working Pentium 75MHZ laptop with 8 MB of RAM for $20. Some of the more fortunate might laugh this off as useless, but to me it was a godsend as I used it extensively to run numerous AD&D (the RPG) applications I had written in PERL. Worked great for those! Then, one day, it went to the great computer home in the sky. Since I'm a geek, this qualified as a "devestating loss." In a single cruel stroke of fate I had lost two things dear to myself: my RPGs, and my computer. I had spent hundreds of hours writing AD&D programs (and a simple searchable database for information) that are as gone now as if Vecna had come down and personally cast "disentegrate" on them. And, typical to the AD&D stereotype, I'm too broke to buy a "new" laptop. Furthermore, I must have ill-luck because I keep hearing "stories" about how old Pentium laptops go for "$20-$40" (including shipping) all the time on E-Bay. I must be looking at the wrong time because I'm just not seeing it. Anyone got any "secret tips" (besides theft *Grin*) to getting older x86 laptops at prices even a poor bastard such as myself can afford?
I applaud Office Depot and HP for their efforts. Perhaps it will stir other vendors into action.
According to this press release, HP already has 2 pretty large facilities for recycling electronic equipement. They already have a pretty decent recycling program for their equipment and are currently offering a coupon when you recycle and then purchase new hardware from them. [Nope, I'm not affiliated with HP!]
I personally wouldn't mind paying an additional few dollars for each piece of computer hardware or electronics if I knew that I could easily recycle it at the end of its life. The recyle option should also be transferrable to anyone that I sold it to. After all, what's $5 more on a $500 product?
_KJH
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
I take old stuff from corporations and individuals and refurbish it and resell it cheap to the needy or young upstart SOHO's....
I take in more stuff than they do and I am,
1. disabled
2. working alone
Come on guys, you can do better than that.
My typical daily run (pick up)is 20 laserjets, 4-5 21" CRT's, +/- a dozen PC's, 6-10 injets, and 2-300 lbs of cables and wall-warts.
If I can do it this much by myself and disabled at that, they can do better. And I DO NOT throw ANY of it away, it ALL goes back to someone. A lot of it I simply refurbish and give away or trade away just to keep it from piling up.
shameless plug, http://www.SystemRecycler.com
.
We don't support creating the flier for you yet, but it's next on our to-do list. Yes, we know the site is ugly. We're working on it. It works like a champ, though.
In Norway we have for some years had a law saying that any shop selling things that should be recycled MUST recive, free of charge, any appliance anu person brings in for recyceling An other law covers what should be recycled.
Hello,
The answer is simple. I belong to a third group: women who, sometimes, enjoy joking and burning karma. Jokes might be good (or bad ones), but they are just jokes, and they pretend to be just jokes. I do not pretend to catch everybody's attention, but your comment really does.
Kisses
--
You'd stumble in my footsteps (Depeche Mode, "Walking in my shoes")
Try FreeCycle.org
Anyone looking to send in an Amiga 3000 for recycling? Mine fell off a table a decade or so ago, and it apparently took quite a shock since the video stopped working. Okay, it was more than a decade. I have a perfectly functioning Umax s900 (no operating system) that I'm not using. :o)?
/. have a hardware swap-and-shop site? There's a way to generate revenue that someone might actually pay for.
I found an old Digital 320p laptop in a scrap pile at a local college, and now I've got the collecting-old-hardware bug. One of these days I'm going to get my hands on some nice old Sun equipment to play around with.
Hey, why the hell doesn't
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Amen, brother. The only thing I have to add is that in typical slashdot form because these two companies are doing this "good" deed it's OK, but if it were Microsoft there'd be a thousand posts about how this is a "bad" thing.
we were moving when I was a kid. My dad made me GIVE AWAY my entire comic book and mad magazine stash going back to the early 50's, because he didn'twant to pay freight on the bigass moving van, they charged by the pound I guess. I had most marvel first additions then -> on to like spidey,thor, fantastic 4, hulkster, x-dudes, yada yada,you name it, and a lot of DC comics as well, stuporman, ratman, green lantern...aww geez... Boxes of them. I could just snivel and whine now...all that stuff gotta be worth 6 figures I bet....and that don't count all the ace doubles neither...... :(
Don't forget there's also DBAN, another open source disk nuker.
It will go on CD or floppy, runs linux, and includes a variety of different methods to wipe with including DoD 7-pass and 3-pass. There's also the 35-pass Gutmann Wipe but it is only appropriate for hard drives from the 70's. Newer drives need not apply.
Here's a good site for more information about sanitizing. The short version: The only way to destroy data is to burn the platters with temps exceeding 750 degrees long enough to cause the iron to lose its magnetic properties. Otherwise to protect against software recovery tools for newer drives you just overwrite with a (good) random number stream (PRNG).
That's why we have an EH&S department.
You know, people will take these things even when you're honest with them.
My parents moved a few years ago from a 3000 sq.ft. house into an 800 sq. ft. condominium. Needless to say, not all their belongings would make the move with them.
My mother sold the best, yard-saled what she could, and then started making a habit of putting things out on the lawn every Tuesday afternoon with a big sign marked "FREE!". By evening, the lawn was empty, except for the sign -- and sometimes that was taken too.
After three months of her Tuesday give-aways, my mother had ridden herself of all the things she wasn't going to take with her. So, the Tuesday before the movers were scheduled to arrive, there came a knock on the door at 3:00 p.m. A shy, sheepish man with a wrinkled, stained shirt asked her if anything was available that day. My mother said no, wished him a good day, and closed the door.
She was surprized that he had the nerve to ask. She was ever more surprized when people came knocking all that afternoon and evening.
Look at another comment he posted here. It is in response to a comment about how it is illegal to throw out monitors in Washington state. He brags about getting away with doing so anyhow.
Then he goes on to suggest we follow his example of dumping our surplus electronics in the dumpsters of local small businesses. He suggests we prey on smaller businesses, because they are less likely to have surveilance cameras.
So, Mattintosh, if your friendly local small business gets charged with having toxic waste in its garbage, who gets charged? And you are OK with that?
Mattintosh, I refrain from calling correspondents names. No comment I have read here this year has tempted me more to break this rule than yours.
Hmmm...will not work for me. I have a beaten ass, non-working Honda Elite 50cc scooter that I need to get rid of.
An old monitor, scsi scanner, and a dead pear tree with a mummified partridge from last christmas.
I am keeping all my old crap, because it may become the only way to truely be free to do what I want (code, create music/video, etc) when the rest of the world is locked down in DRM-madness.
The scary part is that by doing so, I may inadvertantly become a part of a grey-or-black market...
Psst, buddy - want me to rip those CD's to MP3...?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
They already started and have managed to keep it under wraps thus far. I bet you they're just going to do THIS with the "recyled" computers.
No one will question it. Everyone will live in blissful ignorance. Move along, people... nothing to see here.
Ugh this bugs me. This may be selfish but its annoying how Office Depot (OD) does so much for their customers and so little for their employees. I've been working there a year and I only make 35 cents more an hour than I did when I started. My yearly raise was 3%, which is HIGH! Most people only get 2%. As an employee I notice this kind of stuff often. They could save some of the money they are dumping into this recycling plan and help pay their employees a little better. I understand customers make the business, but if it wasn't for employees being so damn nice to them OD wouldn't have any customers. They shaft the employees way too often.
... companies that provide consumer electronics equipment to the EU are legally required to provide a recycling facility to their customers. HP, being one of these companies, has obviously set a scheme up. It makes sense to also offer it in other countries...
I still miss the days when computers were programmed using things like basic. I think if computers nowadays came with programming tools and a programing booklet with every box the world would be a diffrent place. People would write what they want instead of companies writing what they think we want or what they think they can tell us we want. Seriously think about a world where every curious kid could get their hands on a programming book and start to code. I started dabbling in simple batch files and worked my way up when I was younger. I'd still like to learn some real languages because i don't think basic counts and I don't know C but I've learned to use php and other things but being able to get your hands onto any sort of code gives you new respect for the computers. Except for VB. VB is the devil and I have to take those classes for my minor :(. I wanna take C and C++. If we got rid of VB the world would be a happier place as well.
Still boots & runs (except for hit-or-miss floppy drive and the missing Insert key on fold-down keyboard). Windows for Workgroups v 3.11 is still loaded on it, connectivity is via your choice of a 10mb/s 3com microchannel ethernet card, or a half-length IBM 2400 bps modem.
Chip H.
I just recently "saved" a pair of 22" HP monitors from "recycling" at work. Now I'm surfing slashdot at 3200x1200. I cant wait until management decides to recycle the 19" LCDs
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
You're not getting my Timex Sinclair!
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
You write "recycle" in the context of eBay, but what you really mean is "reuse". To recycle something means to break it down and build something out of it again, possibly something quite different. To reuse something means, well, to reuse it in its original form.
Why is this important? You should -always- try to reuse "useless" or "obsolete" things before resorting to recycling. Recycling only claims a portion of the original matter, typically, and always requires energy input to the object again. Reuse does not require these resource expenses, usually.
I remember reading a story about a guy who took old computer parts and somehow melted them down and collected the very little gold that each one had in them for it conduction properties, and made quite alot. Imagine how much could be obtained if they recycled all the PC's its sounds like they're going to get. Enough to go to some worth while charity, thats for sure.
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
Actually, we do pretty well at FreeGeek:
http://www.freegeek.org
Monitors cost $10 to recycle, but everything else is just a suggested (tax-deductible) donation. And we take most everything (just not TVs, photocopiers, and microwaves).
See there's aluminum, but there's also a lot of gold, and copper, and a few other things.
Jeff
I've found that if you set up both to use software flow control you can get by with only two pins.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Staples already did that, looks like someone can't come up with original ideas
When I show up with my System/32! I've been wonderig how the hell to get rid of the thing. Now all I need if a forklift...
I work at office depot and I know very well what will become of all that generously donated hardware. The printers will do my school reports for a while and the spare PC's will make great game servers :) Oh yes, and those credit card numbers and personal data that will undoubtedly remain on the drives, well, amazing those those student loans dissapear.
Thankfully, that's not true.
There are lots of companies that do things out of simple charity, and the desire to do something positive for the community. Now, I have to admit, it used to be infinitely more common before giant evil conglomerates took over, and started killing kittens to make another cent every quarter. However, there are still a few companies around that aren't evil.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've got a Tandy Co. Co. 80 with monitor for you... New in box (opened and used only one). With manuals, but no extra cartridges. Currently employed as a table...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oh, they'll take everything
The problem with them is they start at your bank, not your basement.
The truth shall set you free!
There are 3 solutions
Monitor and punishement, but this can be expensive to monitor everything
Taxes from the local community, no incentive to individuals.
Tax the product, preferably at time of sale. Finely targeted taxation is a good idea. When I bought my car I got an A/C surcharge, but I also got a fuel efficiency rebate. When I bought my fridge I got a tax rebate.
I think targeted action like this can help sway behaviour, and support proper disposal.
Can I be assured the 15-inch monitor I'm giving Office Depot to recycle will not be shipped to China, scavenged for parts, then thrown in a ditch to leak toxic chemicals into the water supply?
There is a limit on the number of three-eyed fish and children without limbs.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Want to "save" me a monitor or two? ;)