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Dell Launches Free PC Recycling
digihome writes to mention the implementation of a free PC recycling service for all systems sold by the company. From the article: "The no-charge home pickup program was announced in June. Dell already offers similar programs in Europe and Canada. After enduring tough criticism over the years from environmental groups, tech companies have started offering more ways for consumers to properly dispose of computer gadgets and to conserve electricity while using computer gear. Among tech companies, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has singled out Dell and mobile-phone maker Nokia for their ecologically conscientious policies."
-r
So we'll sing it again the next time it comes 'round on the guitar.
Metal, after oil, is our least renewable resource. Given that computers use more metal than any other consumer product it makes economic sense (or is that cents!) to reclaim it.
Another useful component is the rare-earth magnets that are in hard drives. Those are pricey and certainly outlast the drives they come in.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
For those who don't own a Dell, there is Free Geek
Remove hard drive first, nuke it yourself. Only way to be sure.
Great idea. On my way to work in Manhattan, I frequently see PC monitors, CPU's, laser printers, etc, on the curb awaiting pickup. AFAIK, NYC does not have a recyling program for these items. They just get added to a landfill in other states. Any program that recycles all the toxic materials found in PC's and related equipment will potentially save the water supply in areas from leachate contamination, as water percolates through landfills. Way to go, Dell! HP better step up the plate!
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
The is room for improvement I think, but on the bright side I really like the aspect that you don't have to purchase a new Dell to get the service.
That allows people to move away from their Dell product without penalizing the environment for it. Now, it would be great if they offered to pick up non-Dell computers too when you make a purhase and want to get rid of the old stuff. Hopefully more companies will take initiative in this.
Justin
http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
"Computer for sale: PII 500MHz - doesn't boot. Buy it Now $25!"
Tell me you can't sell that.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Oooooh, gotta have that. No link to your auction!?
Oh well, what the hell...
Wow, man, your mainframe has more metal than your SUV?
Oh well, what the hell...
*Most* "recycled" electronics in the US end up in trash heaps in China to be picked through by poor people. Gleaned for valuable metals. In these open-air dumps there are no controls on leaching metals into the soil, etc.
There are plenty of more responsible efforts throughout the country some of which are listed here:
http://freegeek.org/recycle.php
Does Dell *really* recycle or just dump the stuff someplace that pays them by the ton? And don't be mislead by Greenpeaces' approval. They score based on production toxicity not recycling cleanliness. Granted Dell's doing "something", but my point is we don't actually know where the boxes end up. TFA didn't say.
Funny, I recycle all my old computers. If nobody else will take them, the public schools will, and give me a reciept for a tax writeoff while I am at it.
This is great, but the article doesn't say what the user can recycle. PCs, sure, but what about monitors or laptops?
In California, we pay an extra $8 when we purchase a monitor (or laptop) to the state for future landfill services. Then when we dump a CRT monitor it's a $20 fee (not sure about laptops or desktops).
-David
Your average computer has enough gold and silver in it for a recycler to churn a rather high profit melting them down.
I remember seeing shows on it in the late 90's.. the average high end CE device (e.g. computer) can be melted down to produce several grams of gold and several oz of silver.
This of course ignores the huge amount of silicon, plastics, and of course aluminum (aluminum is far cheaper to recycle than to smelt as the only known process involves VAST amounts of electricity) which makes up the rest of the machine.
So yeah.. they pick it up for free, but remember that thing is still worth something, even if only as it's component materials, and you're giving it away to them.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Heres the life cycle of a PC in my household
Buy the PC from Gateway and get the latest and greatest
This Machine is the primary PC for me for the next 18 months.
After that it becomes the secondary PC. It is moved to the guest room.
After a year and a half there it is moved to the garage where it runs MAME in my arcade cabinent.
After a while in the garage it is given to my daughter or my mother where they use it for another two years as their primary PC. After that it goes on the trading post and is sold to someone that needs a 5 year old PC.
By the time the last owner gets it the damn thing is 4 or 5 years old and if I had an agreement to recycle it I have forgotten about it completely and the new owner could care less.
I have to think this is fairly typical.
Where are we going to contact Dell/Gateway and recycle this PC.....?
I think they are just going to take all the internals out, and put them in a new case, and sell a $150 computer!!! Oh, and they will of course farm support for those computers out to freaking North Korea or something...
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
if you are in the silicon valley area, please consider ELMARS.ORG, we offer free electronics recycling (drop off at our Fremont warehouse just off I-880), and also offer free pick-up at your location for medium to large quantities.
:)
we are a non-profit california state-certified e-waste collector (one of the few that are state certified), and will give you a 501 c(3) tax-deductible receipt for all electronics that you give us, as well.
help the environment and help your pocketbook, too
see us at www.elmars.org for more info.
thanks!
From the comments written so far I thought an exposition of the swiss system may be interesting.
For a few years now, whenever you buy a piece of electronics you have to pay a mandatory recycling tax, which the store gives back to a government managed recycling fund. The amount depends on the type of equipment.
Next, every electronics store is required by law to accept any piece of equipment for recycling. You can basically bring your old gear to any store for recycling for free, whether you bought it there or not.
Finally the store will then arrange for a recycling company to take these items. For every item processed, the two companies will receive back the corresponding tax amount from the global fund, which they will share in a law-mandated proportion.
The government only manages the fund. Any recycling company can do the job provided it is certified.
The system works well. For the buyer, it is a lot more convenient to bring his old gear to the next store than to get rid of it any other way. And since you were forced to pay for recycling anyhow, why not do it ? I don't rember the numbers but the percentage of recycled gear is quite high.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
yes, this show you watched back in the late 90's, back then it was probably much easier to make a profit in electronics recycling.
back then pentium 1 and pre-pentium 1 boards and cpus had a much higher gold content, but afterwards manufacturers cut back drastically on their use of valuable metals to cut costs.
these days, when most of what a recycler gets is p2 and p3-era machines, and busted monitors (not worth much of anything), they are not as valuable component-wise.
so no, most recyclers do not "churn a high profit" unless they are operating on a HUGE scale, most just get by ok, and do a LOT of work to just get by.
Some of this recyling program is already in place:
r ecycl.php
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/computer_
I've helped to puchase several Dells in the last few years. They have always offered to recycle my old computer for free, regardless of the brand.
They send a shipping label along with the new computer, and you ship it back to them in the same delivery box. Easy as pie, and I'm assuming they have facilities to deal with the extra styrofoam.
This is in California, so perhaps we had this system in place before the other states.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
in partnership with Sony. That's really the solution for E-waste, computers which self-destruct.
http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/
I don't want to read
They got more metal than your puny peta
flops...
Nah, I got nothin'. I can't get a good rhyme for metal.
At least I tried.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I saw mentions of Freegeek so I thought I'd mention Freecycle too. If you don't own a Dell computer (or even if you do) you might want to consider it. I've never participated, but my mother is absolutely fanatical about it. She's given and picked up tons of stuff from participants.
The Freecycle NetworkRecycling is all about conserving energy, not materials. By recycling an aluminum can, you're not saving a precious metal, you're saving the energy used to mine ore and seperate it via electrolysis.
Elemental metals like aluminum exist all around us (even in our bodies), but are mined from concentrated deposits so that less material will need to be seperated from the desired metal by electrolysis, metling, etc. The energy conservation of recycling aluminum vs. harvesting ore and processing it is approximately 95%.
If you mix your metals with kabillions of tons of garbage, then you exponentially decrease the concentration of metal in your 'ore'. The energy expense required to seperate specific metals from trash makes garbage dump mining an unfeasible prospect.
Throwing aluminum (or computers) in the trash and rationalizing that it'll get recycled 'later' by dump mining is a cop out.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"I once found a dual PIII Xeon server on the street, with 4gb RAM and 8 10,000 RPM 12gb SCSI drives (wiped, of course). Three 22" ViewSonic flat screen CRTs. A working professional-quality scanner"
I got hit by a damn taxi waiting for my brother to come by with his truck.
Im using a 13 year old monitor right now.
What do some people do throw em out when they get dirty ?
The EU demands it anyways. *ALL* electronics sellers in the Europe are required to take back all the old hardware for free and recycle it. If they won't they will be slapped with heavy fines, per case. Furthermore, it applies to the old hardware sold before the new regulations as well!
"The no-charge home pickup program was announced in June. Dell already offers similar programs in Europe and Canada."
The kind "offer" of Dell's is actually required by law in Europe, and has been since August 2005. The WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive) legislation came into effect prior to RoHS. One part of this Directive is that any product containing any of six banned substances (lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE)), must be collected and returned to the manufacturer, or his agent, for proper disposal. Similar legislation is coming into effect in a few US states soon, as well as to Japan, China and others.
Thank you Dell, for offering to comply with the law.
Just set your old pc out there by the street, and it magically goes away.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
MOD THIS FUNNY!
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Destroy the old computers, and it's a lot more likely people will buy new ones instead of using an old one if they can.
This is marketing doublespeak. What they are doing is removing the reused-computer, the used market.
They grind the machine, recycle only the plastic and copper. As an LTSP or Citrix terminal or older word-processing box, it could be used for a long time - 100% recycled.
I live in Brazil nowadays, and people _still_ pay US$200 for a used pentium 3 in used-pc stores - monitor not included. Why? Because it's still $200 less than a new P4. And there are very few used machines on the market, so the used price is high. I myself *BUY* old P2 machines to use as LTSP terminals here, no hard disk or cdrom, for about $50. No monitor.
There are stores full of techies who repair old Pentium motherboards, old CDRom drives, all kinds of old junk I used to pick up from the street in New York.
And this is Sao Paulo, Brazil - rather developed actually - not even Africa, or Bangladesh.
You can *still* export all these old, used machines to a whole lot of poorer countries - and sell at destination at a small profit, too.
Why not?
Because regulations of some old international commerce agreement don't allow exporting old junk from first-world countries to poor countries, converting "old garbage" parts into "used market" parts which compete with new parts.
So old cars, motorcycles, computers, farm equipment, etc from US-Japan-Europe junkyards can't be exported, to provide parts for low-labor-cost areas where these things can be repaired and reused.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Lots of good points so far...
First off, yes, this is the law in Europe. Though the UK and France are not doing so well at making it happen. The DACH, Scandinavians and Benelux are..
There is some controversy about big brand holders going ahead and implementing these programs. It is argued that they have a lot of incentive for 'product treadmill' upgrades, and to grind the material instead of reusing parts when it makes sense. However, Design for Environment signals (making products that recycle better) require brand holder participation. No answer to all of it. Need to have price signals on product longevity, like upgrades that work, actually.
Free riders (brands that do nothing and let others pick up the bill) are a known problem of any system. A level playing field is essential to make the competitive economics work.
> a truck coming to your curb to pick up two PCs
Professional logistics are more and more common. Some argue that we do not pay the true costs of gas and pollution. Labor is artificially costly, though...
Public participation is a huge part of any system. Getting people to do something is hard. A common, local collection point makes a lot of sense. And so does the convenience of the prepaid tag plus UPS or whatnot. All variations will be included, because there is just that much stuff...
Yes, these things are valuable. But plastics are not very, if at all. The labor to take them apart often costs more than what you get out of them. Add collection costs, and you have a net liability. Gotta make very, very efficient systems.
>It is 2x more efficient to reclaim gold in PCs than it is to mine it frome ore out the the ground.
It is not the gold, my friends, it is the Red Metal, copper. Copper prices have gone WAY up, and the mining is very, very toxic.
Long term, I claim it is not optional to implement sensible, efficient systems. Don't hold your breath for the government to figure it out. more at
http://ewasteinsights.info/
>> computers use more metal than any other consumer product
...
> For a while now, we've had these things called "automobiles".
The only consumer product to contain more metal than computer is automobiles. And washing machines. TWO. There are TWO consumer products that contain more metal than computers
Double apologies from me - one, I just realized I commented on a comment and should have put this in the main thread, and two, I'm late to weigh in. For full disclosure - I work on environment issues at Dell. There were lots of good thoughts raised in different comment threads and I thought I'd respond to all at once: 1. We're providing both recycling for used Dell-branded equipment for no charge (no purchase necessary) AND recycling of any brand of used computer with the purchase of a new Dell. 2. We absolutely support reuse -we have a donation program in place in several countries that matches donation of a used computer from customer to a non-profit in that customer's community 3. We absolutely prohibit the export of electronic waste by our recyclers -that was a good comment raised here about exports to China, etc. -- we use third-party audits to make sure our suppliers live up to this standard 4. Re the directives in Europe - there are actually two - WEEE which deals with recycling and which our recycling program goes beyond requirements of the directive and ROHS which deals wiht the substances that cannot be used in electronics -- we're putting those standards in place globally and have been more agressive on some substances than what ROHS requires. Again -sorry to put this in two places but there was a lot of good discussion raised in the threads and thought I'd respond to it all at once - any questions about our enviroment programs or policies just let me know. Thanks