Consider your obsolete electronics, your teeming tangles of neglected and broken gear, your no-longer-fashionable castoffs, your busted stuff.
Consider your obsolete electronics, your teeming tangles of neglected and broken gear, your no-longer-fashionable castoffs, your busted stuff.
Just don’t consider it “waste,” the experts say.
Take that dusty calculator or Walkman. Or that ugly phone or that fried iPod, or grandma’s console television/stereo combo. Even video and audio tapes. All of them now can be profitably “de-manufactured” into their constituent parts and reassembled into next year’s devices of the future.
Toss them into a landfill-bound trashcan — and you run afoul of Vermont’s Electronics Waste Law, enacted in April and in effect since Jan. 1.
Wait until July, and you’ll find free drop-off facilities mandated for households, schools and charities, and for businesses with 10 or fewer employees.
Until then, consumers should haul their gear to one of several dozen drop-off sites listed online at the Department of Environmental Conservation E-Waste website, officials say.
Make mine copper
Why bother rescuing televisions and computers (and even computer mice) from the dump?
“There’s some great stuff in there,” said Clare Innes, spokeswoman for Chittenden Solid Waste District. “And there’s also lots of hazardous materials.”
Lead, chromium and mercury fit both categories. Copper and gold also lurk among the soldered remains.
Increased costs of mining those metals have prompted alternatives to our toss-away culture.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that a ton of circuit boards contains 40-800 times the concentration of gold typically found in ore mined in this country.
The yield for copper is 30-40 times richer than copper mined in the U.S.
It’s like compost
Nationwide, consumer electronics comprise only about 2 percent of landfill waste, according to the EPA’s “E-cycle” website. And, the EPA notes, “responsibly managed” waste facilities safely contain electronics-derived toxins from water and soil contamination.
Source: BurlingtonFreePress.com
Written by Joel Banner Baird, Free Press Staff Writer