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."

So how much of that stuff gets...

[Channard]

.. '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.

Re:"word processors"????

[clarkc3]

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

Re:"word processors"????

[N3Roaster]

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.

North Hempstead isn't in upstate New York

[Vultan]

It's as "downstate" as you can get, on Long Island. The recycling company is upstate in Buffalo, NY.

Schools and Gov't Agencies

[robinesque]

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.

Re:"word processors"????

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, equipment from Videc and Wang, among others. There were also a number of dedicated CAD systems of similar vintage.

Re:What about dumping in rural China?

[gbjbaanb]

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 [computeraid.org] that uses MoD-specified data wiping tools, but won't accept anything less than a 450Mhz P3.

Re:What about dumping in rural China?

[triffid_98]

Actually, that's not what really happens. Due to the massive trade imbalance, container shipping back to mainland china is practically free, so vast amounts of the stuff get shipped back to China for 'recycling', otherwise known as burning and recycling the copper,gold,steel and nasty airborne pollutants. Since China doesn't have any environmental laws to speak of this is a real money making operation, not only do they get paid to take the cheap crap they originally sold us but recycling it is a profitable operation in of itself.

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?

Re:Redirecting recycling efforts?

[couchslug]

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.

Not everything old is junk

[Zedrick]

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.