San Marcos Daily Record: A Word About Recycling
Filed under: Earth911 - June 7, 2009
By Ollie & Gloria Maier
From several recycling e-newsletters we review each week, today we will take items from several of them. First, from Resource Recycling we find: “The Texas State Legislature has passed House Bill 821, which targets the recycling of television sets in the state.”
This bill “… requires manufacturers of television sets to provide recycling services to consumers at no charge. It mirrors a bill that was signed into law in 2007 that addressed the recycling of electronic equipment.”
From e-Scrap news, we find “Washington Governor Chris Gregoire’s enactment of House Bill 1522 amends the Evergreen State’s present e-scrap program to allow collectors registered with the state to make minor repairs to collected non-working computers. The law previously only allowed ‘fully-functional’ computers for re-use.”
As the director of one of the collectors stated: “The passing of the law comes at a crucial time for us as the need for computers among unemployed and low income has spiked dramatically over the last three months.”
He explained, “The number of low-cost computers we sell to unemployed individuals has tripled in the last two months, and we had been on the brink of running out of computers.”
(Even though the price of new computers has come down considerably from what they were just a few years ago, they are still above what an unemployed individual can readily afford… Thus used computers are a good source for them to get something to upgrade their skills and enhance their capabilities in the job-market again.)
Switching subjects from electronics, we find in Recycling Today, “Keep America Beautiful (KAB), Stamford, Conn., the national nonprofit organization that is perhaps best known for its community cleanup events such as the Great American Cleanup, has announced a number of partnerships and strategic initiatives designed to benefit recycling.”
In one such partnership “… the Curbside Value Partnership (CVP), which was formed in 2003 by The Aluminum Association and The Can Manufacturers Institute to help communities grow and sustain their residential curbside recycling programs, became part of KAB.”
The KAB “… also has joined forces with Earth911.com. Through this alliance, KAB and Earth911.com say they intend to share resources, editorial content and local recycling information with U.S. consumers, working toward the goal of increasing the recycling rate in the United States.”
Finally for today, a recent visit to the Green Guy Recycling Services drop-off saw a maintainer (road grader is what we called them when we were kids and many roads were dirt) enlarging the drive there making it even more convenient. Kyle said he hopes to also spray an environmental-friendly compound on the surface areas where vehicles drive and people walk (to put recycled things in the proper container) and thus hold down the dust and prevent it from getting muddy when it rains (when we can enjoy such rains again).
Till next week, do have a great one…
For questions or comments, please call Ollie or Gloria at 353-7432 or e-mail them to omaier@TxState.edu.