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Taking a Crack At Recycling E-Waste

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a New York Times article being hosted at News.com. It touches on a new initiative in upstate New York to deal with the problem of e-waste. The Town of North Hempstead has positioned helpers at the dump the last four weekends, assisting people with a flood of old monitors, keyboards, laptops, word processors, and even a Pong game or two. Besides the obvious benefit of getting this junk out of our homes, the article highlights why this should be a growing concern around the country. From the article: "While federal law regulates the disposal of electronics by businesses and government agencies, it does not affect individual consumers, who account for more than half the e-waste produced annually, according to the federal agency. Every old computer monitor contains about four pounds of lead, and other parts are filled with heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, cadmium and chromium. They have toxins that hover in the air after incineration or leach into the water supply when buried in landfills. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh say that dumps around the nation's major cities, including New York, hold more than 60 million computers."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory by jpaz · · Score: 4, Funny

    This post made with 100% recycled electrons.

    1. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I can tell. It looks like you just took /dev/null and shook it out over the keyboard. PLEASE take your bit bucket to the recycling center in the future instead of just dumping it.

  2. The hardest part is almost done by Neoncow · · Score: 2, Funny

    The hardest part is sorting out the ones and the zeros without generating more ones and zeros than you started with. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University believe they are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the E-Waste initiative.

  3. Re:"word processors"???? by loconet · · Score: 2, Funny
    --
    [alk]
  4. How dare you!? by dangitman · · Score: 3, Funny
    Pong is junk? Blasphemy!! Burn the witch!

    Next thing you'll be saying is Pacman is gay. Hello? Ms. Pacman? Pacman is a red-blooded heterosexual disc with a triangle cut out.

    --
    ... and then they built the supercollider.