Electronics recycling still much too difficult

Last weekend, a church in Great Falls, Va., held an electronics recycling event. There I was able to get rid of a trunk load of old PCs, peripherals and consumer electronics that had been cluttering up my home office.
I had been looking for a while for a way to properly dispose of the gadgets. I didn’t want the toxic metals they contain to end up in a landfill or the water supply.
Based on my difficulty in trying to find a responsible method of disposing of electronics, I am convinced that most people just dump old PCs, mobile phones and other devices in the garbage.
Frankly it’s too much of a hassle to get rid of old electronics today. You usually have to find a store like Best Buy that’s willing to accept your items and then find an employee who can take them off your hands. Some locations will only take a couple of items at a time and not all kinds of devices.
I’ve said before that the best solution is to have curbside recycling of electronics, just like we do today for paper, plastic, glass, aluminum and steel. That’s the only way to make it easy and convenient.
The group holding the recycling event, the St. Francis Episcopal Church’s J2A Youth Pilgrimage, sorted through the PCs and accessories for items that could be reused and had the rest disposed of in “an environmentally safe manner.”
A local company called Shred Station Express, a mobile recycling service, was on hand to collect computers and other electronics for destruction.
I was happy to make a donation to the church group for organizing the event.

Photo: My trunk load of PCs, monitors, accessories and consumer electronics.

7 interesting science and nature lists: invasive species, medical myths, etc.

Here are some interesting listicles I’ve come across in my website visits. This time the subject is nature and science.

5 Species That Seem to be Trying to Take over the Earth (Cracked)

9 Invasive Species In The U.S. (Huffington Post)

Top 10 Evil Animals (Time)

6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of (Cracked)

Top 10 Common Medical Myths (Listverse)

20 things you didn’t know you could recycle. (Mother Nature Network)

8 Wonders of the Solar System (Scientific American)

Photo: Asian silver carp jumping out of the water when startled by a boat’s motor. (Student Science). 

Compact fluorescent lamp bulbs not so 'green'

As an eco-friendly or “green” product, compact fluorescent lamp light bulbs are a failure.
During my recent move, a burned-out compact fluorescent bulb was among the toxic items I needed to dispose of properly.
I’ve written before that if recycling or waste disposal isn’t easy, people won’t do it. Curbside recycling and hazardous waste pickup is the ideal. We had that in Wilmette, Ill., for aluminum and steel cans, plastic bottles, newspaper and junk mail, and even lead-acid batteries and motor oil. But the village didn’t pick up everything, such as fluorescent light bulbs.
My options for the dead fluorescent bulb were limited and not well publicized. Researching on the Web what to do with the bulb yielded few attractive options. The village of Wilmette collected them at the town hall one day a month. I was told you could dispose of them at the local hardware store for free if you bought a new one. I was moving, so that was not a good option. Home Depot stores also will take them back.
The only other option was to drive 30 miles back and forth to a central hazardous waste facility in Chicago. No way to that.
Ultimately I was able to sweet talk the public health official at Wilmette village hall to take my compact fluorescent bulb and a regular tube fluorescent light ahead of the monthly collection date. She also took a mercury thermometer and some prescription medicine that needed special disposal as well.
I suspect that most people wouldn’t have bothered and would have pitched the stuff in the trash. CFL bulbs may be energy efficient, but the mercury they contain doesn’t make them a good green item because most of those bulbs will end up in the landfill anyway. (CFL bulbs also are supposed to have long lives, but the one I disposed of did not.)
Our best option in the future is LED lights but the price needs to come down to be affordable to mainstream consumers.

No more phone books, please!

In the digital age, it’s hard to believe that companies are still printing phone books.
But this week, a couple more new phone books thumped on my front porch. I can’t remember the last time I flipped through one looking for a business listing or person.
With online directories and search engines like Google and Yahoo, paper phone books are unnecessary. They take up space, clutter kitchen drawers and pollute the environment. It’s simply easier to use the Internet to look up businesses, government agencies and people. I’d much rather type in keywords than try to guess where a listing might be in a phone book.
Online directories often come with customer reviews, integrated maps and links to detailed Web pages for more info. Plus, you’re much more likely to get up-to-date information online than through a printed phone book.
In addition to mainstream directories like AT&T’s Yellowpages.com, there are Web 2.0-style directories like Yelp, where people write reviews and rate restaurants, stores and more.
But back to those pesky phone books. I’ve got five current ones from three or four publishers sitting in a kitchen cabinet. I recycle the old ones with the newspapers. But now I’m tempted to pitch the new ones too.
One organization working to eliminate the unsolicited delivery of Yellow and White pages phone books is YellowPagesGoesGreen. It seeks to get directory publishers to stop the practice on their own or face legislation to mandate the stoppage. The organization would like the equivalent of the National Do-Not-Call Registry, which helped to decrease the number of unwanted telephone solicitations. The group wants phone books to go only to those households that request them. Sounds reasonable to me.
More than 500 million phone directories are printed every year, according to YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. The Web site offers these statistics:

To produce 500 million phone books:

19 million trees are harvested
1.6 billion pounds of paper are consumed
7.2 million barrels of oil are used to produce the books (not including gas used for their delivery to your doorstep)
3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are squandered

268,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up

Another Web site, Eco Yellow Pages, reports that several states are considering legislative measures to make unsolicited delivery of phone books illegal. However, the Yellow Pages industry has a “powerful lobbying effort and a strong economic incentive to stop these efforts (97% of the estimated $14 billion in U.S. yellow pages revenue comes from printed directories),” Eco Yellow Pages says.
Both YellowPagesGoesGreen.org and Eco Yellow Pages offer consumers ways to opt-out of receiving phone books.

(Top photo: Current phone books in my house. Bottom photo: Art from YellowPagesGoesGreen.org)

Electronics recycling is too much of a bother

Let’s face it; most people won’t recycle their PCs and consumer electronics until it’s free and easy.
Driving through my neighborhood, it’s not uncommon to see CRT monitors, TVs and other electronics put out with the trash. The garbage crews dutifully pick up these items and toss them in their trucks with all the other refuse to dump in the landfill.
I try to be a good citizen and recycle as much as I can – aluminum cans, tin cans, plastic bottles, newspaper, office paper, etc. I even save old running shoes to recycle when there are occasional drives.
The last couple of years I’ve saved up my old electronics to drop off at an annual event sponsored by Motorola and the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County, Illinois. I’m aware that electronics gear contains toxic materials such as lead, cadmium and mercury that can leak into the soil and ground water when disposed of in landfills. I don’t want that on my conscience.
This year’s day-long event was held on Oct. 11 at Motorola’s headquarters in Schaumburg, Ill. By all accounts it was a great success. The 10th annual event processed 2,460 vehicles, diverting about 134 tons of residential equipment from the landfill.
But to drop off my small quantity of electronics – a couple of spent lithium-ion laptop batteries, two busted digital cameras, a DVD player, a VCR, a few MP3 players and miscellaneous PC peripherals – I had to wait in a line of traffic for nearly an hour. And that’s after driving 21 miles to get there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if participation at next year’s electronics recycling event drops off because people got fed up with the wait this year.
The problem with recycling electronics is that there’s no simple, standard way to do it. Some businesses offer free recycling on trade-in. Others charge a fee for recycling PCs or TVs. Then there are community recycling events like the one I attended. Consumers have to do some research. Most won’t bother.
Municipalities should encourage some sort of curbside pickup along with the regular recycling collection. Have special, colored plastic bags to hold electronics trash. Better separated than in with the other garbage, I say.