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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."
This post made with 100% recycled electrons.
.. 'helped' onto E-Bay. If it's working or repairable, I guess some of the stuff gets pocketed and recycled onto E-Bay or put into home use. You can replace the batteries on defunct iPods for example. My own iPod mini, for example, was screwed, but I managed to get the 4GB drive out of it, which was working fine, and the drive now stores my music for my 360.
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
-b.
besides software word processors, you used to be able to buy hardware ones that were the equivilent of a really fancy typewriter. I know I used one for a year or two before I got my first computer back around 1996
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!
It's as "downstate" as you can get, on Long Island. The recycling company is upstate in Buffalo, NY.
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.
Are the United States really so far behind in environmental issues?
I understood from Bush that he does not really care about the environment (relative to other issues), but I would think that lower levels of government would already have acted more responsibly.
Over here, the separated collection of waste, including separate places where electronic waste (computers, household electronics) has been in place for many years.
We even pay a small fee on new equipment to pay for the recycling of old equipment.
I think the US should change from "we only care about economics and hate to pay for others" into something more responsible.
We have about 60 HP Vectras sitting in a closet at my school. They're being used for nothing, and the school district refuses to let them go. So they're going to have to be thrown away. I know any number of people that would like to pick one up to play with, whether to use it as a spare Linux box, or simply to take apart and salvage parts out of. But the district can't get out of it's own way to put them to use, so they're probably going to sit in that closet until someone can take them to the dump.
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.
Yes, equipment from Videc and Wang, among others. There were also a number of dedicated CAD systems of similar vintage.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I would disagree
[alk]
While probably not solving the problem but displacing it, how about using old computers for the $100 computer initiative for developing countries.
They would definitely use more power than the $100 computers designed for this purpose but chances are they would provide the same amount of processing power, better graphics, more hard drive space and would have available monitors and network/WiFi adapters.
As I said, that this is displacing the problems as now the developing countries will have to deal with the waste at some point in time. But, it could give their economies & education systems a much needed boost.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
What am I missing?
Age.
KFG
It could be just me. I was just shopping online for a second external hard drive after the first one got full, with some useful but mostly 'can't delete yet-might need in future' kind of stuff.
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.
2k isn't being sold anymore either, and it was expensive and AFAIK there aren't all that many copies out there among consumers, and then there's the question of how many of those that have it would want to part with it. Most people haven't even heard about linux, and most of those that did probably think of it as "something only for crazy nerds" or something along those lines.
Yes, recycling computers is definitly doable, the problem isn't how hard it is for someone who actually wants to do it, the problem is that it's not being done much.
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
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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.........
The funadamental problem with computers is the nature of their design, or rather, the current easiest/cheapest methods. Take a look at a lot of the current day products and how easy some of them are to recycle. A lot of kids toys are made of one giant piece of plastic, all the same kind of plastic. Most food containers are now that way too. Computers can't be made that way. They are a very diverse collection of parts, assembled in ways not meant to be disassembled, and the parts are so small and so numerous that even if you wanted to take them apart it would be very difficult work. I can't imagine how long it would take someone to take apart a motherboard into recyclable pieces. Optical drives, power supplies, fans, none of these lend themselves well to recycling. We can't just keep burying our trash, that doesn't make the problem go away, it just pushes it off on the next generation to deal with. Eventually we are going to have to deal with all our trash.
Really it would not surprise me if in say, 50 years, there is an entire industry of waste reclamation, where a company bids on and BUYS a landfill, and sends in machines to process the garbage and make a proffit off what's reclaimed.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
From TFA:
old Commodore Plus/4's with cracker crumbs in the keys
Aaaargh! A Commodore Plus/4 should not be thrown away/recycled. I would pay up to $100 for a Plus/4 depending on condition and serial numhber, and it's irrelevant if it's filled with cracked crumbs or not.
This is like saying "Oh, I'll just get rid of these 2000-year old Roman coins, they can't be used in the store anymore."
If you have some old 70's or 80's (or "exotic" 90's) hardware in the wardrobe, please please please don't get rid of it before first spending 5 minutes on google to see if there might be collectors that are looking for *your* wardrobe-"junk".
I'll lie sleepless tonight, thinking about morons who might throw away their old Commodore C65 or Commodore MAX without having any idea how invaluable they are. Even common things like a C64C are still in demand, although you won't get that much for it.
Instead of just grinding up 4 year old computers, they can be put to other uses. There ought to be more effort put into reuse before recycle. For instance, if you have some old computer you need to get rid of, at least post it up on the free section of craigslist or freecycle first. You don't even have to make a big fuss about it. Just tell people to pick it up off your porch, or say you've put it on the curb for the trash collectors the next morning, someone hurry and get it if they want. Just communicate! It doesn't take much effort.
This doesn't go for just computers. You might be surprised how easy it is to get rid of everything from old clothes to building material to cellphones.