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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."
I think you may just be too young. Before home computers were commonplace, there were these machines that were sort of like a computer, printer, monitor, and keyboard stuffed into the same box, but the computer part only ran primitive word processing software. It was a step up from the typewriter (saving, editing, printing multiple copies, keys generally didn't jam up), but not as expensive as a computer+monitor+printer+software. These were called word processors.
Remember RFC 873!
Most of the problem isn't about corporate data - any charity that recycles computers guarantees that the data is wiped and uses specialist equipment to clean the drives, but that they only accept relatively good computers.
Look at ComputerAid International that uses MoD-specified data wiping tools, but won't accept anything less than a 450Mhz P3.
Steel is quite efficient too. I'll take all I can get, because the nice folks at the scrapyard pay me for it.
I find the whole e-waste thing questionable for one reason.
I buy cars to part out and then send to the crusher.
A car has hundreds of pounds of plastic, glass, and miscellaneous metals including lead in the battery.
I watch those cars go straight into the crusher.
When I have old comps and monitors and televisions, they go into those cars along with a wide variety of scrap from my shop.
The folks crushing the cars don't care, and the materials are sorted at the shredder.
There is nothing in the computers that isn't in the cars, so why not scrap them together? The computer waste stream is dwarfed by the auto recycling stream, and the auto recycling process is highly refined.
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