Here’s a dismaying article. It seems that more than half of the electronic articles taken to recycling centers in the U.S. end up being shipped overseas, where the goods are frequently dismantled in manners dangerous to the individuals involved and hazardous to the environment as a whole. In other words, we’re just exporting the whole problem of consumer-electronics waste to other places.
This makes a recent event I witnessed seem even more ironic. The local trash and recycling company recently had a free electronics recycling day. You could bring in your old computers, TVs, cell phones, etc. for recycling without having to pay the usual fee (which is something like $10-20 for large items and CRTs and nothing for smaller items). This event generated so much interest that people lined up in their cars for blocks (literally) to drop off their stuff. It struck me as completely absurd that Boulderites, who are generally more affluent than average and ostensibly also of higher-than-average environmental awareness, would line up in their cars (most of them SUVs) just to avoid paying a few bucks to get rid of their discarded gizmos. I decided to not wait in line and drove to a nearby recycling center run by a different company and cheerfully paid them $20 to get rid of some old stuff.
Now, did either I or anybody who waited in that line do any good for anyone/thing, given the previously cited article? I don’t know.
