Recycling

First off, I'm not one of those "green" folks who's all in to recycling everything from milk cartons to shoe laces, unless you make it convenient for me. It's not much effort for me to separate a few bottle, cans and paper from the rest of the trash. In fact I wish curb side recycling was expanded to include things like recyclable steel cans and those milk cartons I mentioned earlier. But one thing that really gets me is electronics.

I one had an old TV break down (as far as I could tell, it may have just needed a new picture tube) but the guy at the repair shop (and believe me, just finding a repair shop was the first hurdle) told me that it would be cheaper to replace it than repair it. Needless to say, I ended up getting ride of it, but it always bothered me that a very decent tv was trashed for no other reason than the economics of contemporary appliances valued disposability over longevity. And I know I'm not alone in this story.

Recently I was getting rid of some old computers, and I didn't want to have to just throw everything in the trash. I looked in to some of the reuse programs, where they refurbish them and donate them to schools or other places in need. I couldn't find anything in the area (plus they were older Mac computers). I looked into recycling on the Apple website and they WILL recycle an old computer with the purchase of a new one. While I don't need an excuse to buy a new Apple, I decided to look on.

I found some places that did recycle programs for free, but that was for a limited time and also a few years ago. The only place I found in the area doing a computer recycling program at the present time was Staples... yeap, your local office supply store had been doing a program where you can recycle old cell phones, pages, and rechargeable batteries for some time and has now expanded it to include computers.

The catch... there's a $10 dollar charge per computer (computer, keyboard, mouse), and a $10 charge for a monitor. It would be nice if it was free (like the rest of the program), but it was convenient, and I could believe that at least some of it was going to be reused, instead of the whole thing lying in a trash heap for a millennium. I paid the dough and dropped off the old equipment and I feel at least a little better for trying to do my part...

If you're interested in more info, here's the press release...
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=96244&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1004542