MarketWatch: The 15-Minute Tip: Recycling Electronic Gear
Filed under: Earth 911 - March 19, 2008
By Jennifer Openshaw
Last week I shared secrets on how to properly handle burned out compact fluorescent lamps. CFLs are the latest electronic product to produce big-ticket effects on the environment—but certainly not the only one.
The boom in affordable consumer electronics has made more stuff available at lower prices for years on end. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: there’s more different kinds of stuff—computers, cell phones, CFLs—and life cycles are getting shorter and shorter.
More gear is going obsolete all the time, and more waste is the inevitable result. So I thought I’d follow with some 15-minute resources to help find proper recycling and disposal for your old electronic gadgets.
The coming bulge
In the “old days” a TV might have lasted 10 or 15 years, and an audio component system even longer. But now, according to the EPA and other sources, the average computer lasts about three years; the average cell phone about two.
Worse, analog TVs—at least those not connected to a digital converter—go belly up next February.
And an EPA study of product life cycles highlights a big bulge in CRT computer monitors purchased in the 2003-2005 timeframe nearing the end of useful life. The EPA estimates some 673,000 tons of CRTs sold in the year 2005 alone will head for landfills unless otherwise handled.
“Otherwise handled” means recycled, and EPA figures show only about 15 to 20 percent of such electronic waste is recycled properly these days. The percentage has been constant for eight years although the amount has grown due to the sheer amount of product.
And, as more products run on rechargeable batteries, the exposure to hazardous e-waste is also growing. Lead, mercury, cadmium and bromine are among the unique environmental hazards of electronic waste—not to mention the usual plastic, glass and metal they’re for the most part made of.
Electronic waste also offers unique opportunities for value recovery, with the many advanced materials and even gold and silver often recovered. Notably, the amounts are small enough and the recovery complex enough that you won’t benefit economically, but it still conserves precious resources.
How to unplug
While recycling for CFLs is still in its early stages, it isn’t as hard to find places to take your e-waste if you’re willing to look. Several manufacturers and retailers, in addition to traditional local recycling operations, offer straightforward solutions:
- Earth911. This recycling portal lists local municipal and store-based recycling for most of your e-waste. Handily, it breaks the “electronics” category down into mobile phones, computers, monitors, televisions, speakers and printers, so you can target exactly what you want to recycle. There are lots of categories besides electronics also. My search yielded five Staples stores within 10 miles of my southwestern Connecticut home. Further down the list (sorted by distance) were several municipal and private recycling centers, with restrictions like “for Westchester County residents only” clearly shown.
- EPA e-cycling partners page. This handy reference links you to major manufacturers and retail chains and their Web sites. Recycling in the retail space at stores such as Staples, Radio Shack and Best Buy has become fairly common. A few manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard, have had long-standing commitments to recycling hatched out of legal commitments to recycling in Europe. Some of these so-called “manufacturer take-back programs” deal with products the manufacturers didn’t even sell. For HP and others, you can learn how and where to recycle their products most efficiently. Check the site.
- Electronics Industry Alliance. Targeted specifically to electronics, the “e-cycling central” page allows you to search for outlets in your state. And, speaking of states, there are some good state-specific resources, notably California’s “eRecycle” emerging from a 2003 law governing electronic waste. Visit the site.
- Rechargeable batteries. The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation “call2recycle” page gives places to recycle this particularly hazardous waste. Yes, those cell-phone, PDA, Game Boy, laptop and power-tool batteries all fall into this space. Check the site.
Don’t throw it away
The upshot of all of this: you don’t have to—and shouldn’t—just throw those electronic products away. It’s worth 15 minutes to check your options and it’s worth 15 minutes more to “stop by” with that old cell phone or monitor.