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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 one of the solutions is to get companies to donate old equipment, or give it to organizations that will fix it up and give to the needy. I have seen companies trash perfectly good computers, but refuse to give them to anyone. These computers were far from useless, and could be used by grandma to get email and surf the net. I think if these type of programs were setup at companies it would reduce the level of waste considerably.
Still we need a solution to the problem of lead and other toxic chemicals leached into the soil. That makes me wonder...what happened to all the stories of businesses dumping this type of waste in rural China?
Steve Wiseman
http://www.windows-admin-tools.com
There's a recycling site near here, and the best part is they don't mind people taking away stuff that's been left there (with the usual disclaimers). It's a bit depressing to find out some people will throw away perfectly fine (and often new) PCs just because the windows installed on it got spyware.
Perhaps the nation as a whole should put more effort into recycling e-waste and less into the more inefficient plastics and glass, since heavy metals can cause big problems if not taken care of properly. I've also heard that the only thing proven to be efficient to recycle (in terms of energy) would be aluminum (link). Since the other ones probably don't even save us energy, why not put more efforts into something that may save us in the future? All the other recycling is probably done just for politicians to cozy up to environmentalists.
If a person company wants to build a bridge or building or something, then the effect on the public and environment is often considered.
But if a company decides to make millions of widgets and sell them to the public, the effect of this is often overlooked.
Company says the consumer bought the toys containing plastic and lead, so claims that the problem is offloaded to the consumer.
But the consumer does not decide how to make the widget or what it is made of. This is what the company and government regulation does.
The way to control waste is not by creating "recycle" programs after the fact, but rather to more tightly control product creation to reduce waste from the start. This applies to anything that can fill up the landfills/ditches, or create a hazard.
Brewer and Stringer are promoting a new City law, Intro 104, to require manufacturers to recycle products in a complete product lifecycle:
The Council's Technology in Government committee is running a public feedback survey on recycling.
When the World Is Running Down" by the Police
--
make install -not war
Heheh...I hear ya.
Was funny, the other day I was with a friend who is collecting and restoring old pinball machines. The 'digital' ones are quite fun, but, I'd forgotten about what a real pinball machine was supposed to sound like until I got onto his selection of EM machines, that had actual bells, and chimes on them for sounds.
The clicking and clacking of the score reals, especially when resetting for a new game.....ahhh...was like reliving some old childhood dreams.
There are just some things where analog will always be superior IMHO to digital....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Wow, keeping something electronic longer than two years? I dunno, living in the bay area, I don't see a lot of that. I see computers thrown in dumpsters all the time that can't be more than 4 or 5 years old. I've thrown a few Pentium II machines away myself simply because I don't have room for them. I also do tend to upgrade a major component in my computer every 6 months or so, so I have a lot of older expansion cards and HD that I have to get rid of regularly. Heck, who wants an old 56k modem, 10bT ISA ethernet card, or 2GB hard drive anyway? Sure there might be someone out there, but honestly I don't have the time or patience to deal with e-bay. Not worth how much I could get for this junk.
:D
I am however responsible... I have a 19" CRT that's in good condition that I have to PAY to get disposed of simply because I don't use it anymore. Soon to be replaced by a 24", 6ms Samsung
I don't typically post, much less as a grandfather, but here goes. Someone somewhere got me interested in the profitability of electronics waste(recycling). If I remember correctly, to be a recycler, all you have to do is do one of three things. Store it, sell it, or recycle it "properly" (EPA guidelines, etc--probably pretty expensive). So what do these recycling outfits do? In order to maximize profit, they charge you to take it off your hands. Then they sell as much of the stuff they "recycle" as possible, and store the rest of it in giant warehouses. What recycler would actually have any incentive to turn this stuff into non-hazardous waste? Do a google search for electronics recycling and look how big their warehouses are (typically).
Forget this. In memorial.