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?"

Comments

other ways to recycle...

[jmrobinson]

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!

Monitors have lead - please recycle

[lawpoop]

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.

Re:Monitors have lead - please recycle

[Jonboy X]

Funny, I was always under the impression that they mined lead out of the ground in the first place! So what exactly would be the problem with putting it back where it was?

The problem is in the fact that you're spreading that stuff around. We (humans) take lead from lead mines. Before we got there, it was pretty deep underground. Furry woodland creatures already knew enough not to live deep underground in lead mines, but when we dump this crap in their homes, they've got nowhere to go. It's kinda like flooding. Sure, the water was always around, but not in such high concentrations, and not in your living room.

Consider ebay.

[jafo]

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

Reuse before Recycle

[nulltransfer]

Instead of recycling electronics, it would be much better if they could send them to less-developed countries where high-tech is more or less non-existant.

Recycling is better than throwing out, but I recall it only usually saving 20% energy. Reusing, on the other hand, is much more efficient.

Re:Clever

[gerardrj]

While it is indeed true that there is a lot of money to be made in the recycling business, most all of that money to be made is in charging consumers to recycle instead of tossing things in the landfill.

With the exception of aluminum, most recycling programs would loose money if not for the fees charged to end users.

Re:stuff owns us

[AKAImBatman]

If you just want a *nix box to run sendmail or just for the sake of it, it's usually more efficent to have an old Pentium II (which are almost always faster unless you're doing 3D stuff on the SGI) and run Linux/BSD on it.

But they lack the flexibility of the Unix hardware. That stuff was designed to work no matter what, to be fixable no matter what, and to be remotely accessible no matter what. You just can't get that type of reliability out of an x86. It simply isn't built for the type of abuse that a Unix machine was engineered for.

Call me when PCs get OpenBoot, and I'll begin to consider them for serious work.