Office Depot Wants to Recycle Your Old Computer

IcerLeaf writes "CNN reports that Office Depot will happily recycle one old electronics item per customer, per day, from July 18th through September 6th. Qualifying electronics include computers, monitors, printers, scanners, fax machines, digital cameras, cell phones, and TVs 27" or smaller. Office Depot and Hewlett Packard will be splitting the bill. What's coming out of your basement?"

Re:What's coming out of my basement?

[Neil Blender]

One a side note, if you have anything that works, it is possible to find charities that will accept old equipment (not too old, but not necessarily working.) You can write it off. I donated an old G3 last year and took a $200 write off.

Re:A happy customer recommends

[gevmage]

And where do I find these blessed individuals? A link with "find a store near you" would be great.

Re:A happy customer recommends

[tekunokurato]

Google is your friend [google.com]. They mostly deal with corporations, though; it's not a "drop by with your computer after work" thing.

Need to Find a Store?

[OctaneZ]

Need to know where [officedepot.com] to go dumpster diving?

Re:Clever

[knitting fool]

I personally don't care if they're in it for their wallets. If one person recycles a moniter (or whatever) that would have otherwise gone into a dump (and consequently into the groundwater) I say, "good for them". Assuming the customers have a little self control and don't go on a spending spree after droping off the electronics, it isn't hurting them a bit.

Re:other ways to recycle...

[Snap E Tom]

Please don't. Ask yourself whether you'd want to use this machine everyday.

I volunteer for a medium-sized nonprofit. We get a fair number of PIII's that we use and a lot of 486's and PI's that we can't. Sure, we get a lot fewer PIII's and even PIV's, but there's enough out there on the market that our staff of sixty all have PIII's and above. People think they can just dump off their toxic crap and get a tax write off. Instead, they just shift the burden of getting rid of this stuff on us.

Re:"tossing out" PCs?!

[Phantasmo]

Electronics Recycling [electronic...ycling.com] takes all kinds of stuff. They recycle everything on the Accepted Materials list. Best of all, if you drop it off there's no charge!

They have a location in Scarborough at:
Unit# 14 - 80 Midwest Rd
Scarborough ON M10 4R2
416-285-0588
9-5 Monday to Friday

We use them all the time. It's way better than paying the city to just have the stuff tossed in the dump anyway.

Related Article...

[MisterLawyer]

I remember reading an article [wired.com] about 6 months ago in Wired about the waste problem and some recent legislation to help combat it. In particular, it talks about the Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003, and various new incentives in the tax code. A short read, it's an easy way to quickly understand the current state of computer waste legislation in America.

Also, the article specifically mentions Dell's recycling efforts:
"Computer makers such as Round Rock-based Dell Inc. have stepped up programs to take back old PCs"
No mention of HP, though, so maybe HP is just doing a better job of publicizing their program, despite being about half a year later than Dell.

Re:Monitors have lead - please recycle

[Some Woman]

That lead is in the glass. How is it going to get into the water supply?

Source: Solid Waste Management Coordinating Board presentation to the Environment and Natural Resources Policy Committee of the Association of Minnesota Counties. 18 Sept 2003.

Lead is in the phosphorescent coating of the tube - fused between 2 pieces of glass, so an unbroken CRT is relatively safe, but crushing CRT glass releases solid lead into the environment

Lead in the funnel and face plate glass - does not leach readily

Lead in the 'frit' which joins the face plate glass to the funnel glass leaches readily when subjected to TCLP* test

[*]Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure

Re:other ways to recycle...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how many charities have rules on how new the equipment needs to be before they'll accept it? Lots of places will reject any monitor smaller than 17" or any CPU earlier than a Pentium.

Now that a baseline "normal" computing experience includes browsers, plug-ins, audio players, and video players that require a relatively recent CPU, it really sucks to have anything less.

Re:Monitors have lead - please recycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Read this [hp.com] for starters. I've visited the recycling facility, it's pretty cool. Although I think they have to ship CRTs to some place in Canada that can incinerate them

Bad idea (unless you give your time, too)

[khasim]

#1. The tech is OLD. It will fail. Why should they spend $50 for a replacement power supply when a brand new box is $199?

#2. The tech is SLOW. Again, a new box costs $199 and runs 10x faster than the old stuff.

#3. When they finally do buy the $199 stuff, they'll be stuck with the recycling costs of your old stuff.

Of course, none of this matters if you also give your time and expertise to keep it running and so on. Those older machine can make great servers and firewalls, if you will set them up and maintain them.

Re:broken laser Printers, be gone!

[slashjames]

A warning for those who will be getting rid of old computers: make sure the hard drive is wiped clean (and I don't mean with format). I would recommend using software similar to Autoclave [washington.edu]. Every once in a while we get stories posted here about people picking up HDs from eBay and finding all sorts of goodies still on them... Don't be one of those people.

Re:broken laser Printers, be gone!

[TClevenger]

www.freecycle.org

Seriously, it works. Find the site in your area and post it there.

Re:broken laser Printers, be gone!

[dubiousmike]

if you have "replacement cost" on your apartment or homeowners insurance, your defunct electronics magically turn into brand new equiptment if you happen to have an insurance loss that damages said equiptment.

"Replacement cost is about an extra $75 per month. 20 Years of replacement cost is about as much as the new tv you will get when that 25 year old one gets wet when you have a fire.

Some of you have friends who are insurance agents. Did they recommend you get "replacement cost"? If not, they aren't your friend. They work on a loss ratio for their bonuses from the companies. The larger total of all claims from all customers refered from the agent, the smaller the bonus. The more customers with replacement cost, the larger the total claims from all refered customers.

get it?

Re:If only there was one in MA

[EvilMagnus]

I just posted elsewhere that if you live in Boston you can, in fact, do this. The City of Boston will come to your house and take away monitors and TVs FOR FREE. All you have to do is call them.

http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/hazardou sw aste.asp

Of course, if you live elsewhere you usually have to pay money, get stickers and drive the stuff to your local DPW dump.

Re:bill? Ahahahaha.

[dcw3]

Seriously, corporations don't do jack unless they think it'll help them sell their wares.

I suppose that at the Fortune 500 company I've worked at for 22+ yrs, that that's the reason they've sponsored:
1. Local races supporting cancer research, and children with brain damange
2. Annual creek cleanup
3. United Way...every year
4. Matching funds donations to numerous charities (I've written many personal checks that were doubled up)
5. Etc.,...I'm sure if I spent ten minutes, I could triple this list.

Yes, they're in business to make money, but to insist that all that stuff is done just to sell our wares is nothing but crap. I personally know a couple of VPs at major companies, and my dad was a business owner...they are REAL people, and they didn't all get there by being cold hearted SOBs.

I wouldn't give them my hard drive...

[jonasmit]

Unless you are absolutely sure that you have completely sanitized it. We have all seen reports here and elsewhere of banks/companies who have sold formatted hard drives where confidential data was still recovered.

Re:I hoarde this crap..

[HeyLaughingBoy]

up in Princeton, Minnesota they have a machine gun shoot (www.tankrides.com).

Not for long! I saw an ad in last Sunday's paper: the guy is selling the business.

The world gets smaller every day. I heard about this outfit in a tiny northern town no-one knows about just a week ago and now it's on Slashdot!

Re:broken laser Printers, be gone!

[macdaddy]

A word to the wise, DO NOT use any old saw dust/chips as mulch. In fact almost all will cause damage to trees and buildings. "Why" ,you ask? "Wood chips are wood chips, right?" Wrong! The vast majority of wood chips attract termites, among other things. Mulching the flower beds around your home with maple or pine chips is like lathering your ass in honey and jumping into the grizzly bear pit at your local zoo. Not a good thing to do. Using the wrong wood chips around trees will also lead to termite infestation in your living tree. Sawdust can cause nitrogen depletion in the soil as well as fungal contamination in some plant. That's not a good thing either. You want to use very specific types of wood chips. You should use Cedar, Cypress, Eucalyptus wood chips as these will deter most bugs. Also note that bark chunks are not the same as wood chips. They have different bug deterring properties, not to mention visual appearance and most importantly price. A quick Google search [google.com]will give you lots of information including this Lowes page [lowes.com]. I was a landscaper in a former life.

Re:stuff owns us

[Junta]

Sure you can.

Even down to the 'entry' level x86 servers there are quite a few systems with significant management features built in or available as a feature. For example, the IBM e325 (an Opteron box, but still in the same class as other entry servers), has a management controller that allows remotely querying and controlling aspects of the system via the network (querying fan/voltages/power state/system events/snmp alerts on error condition, system watchdog/power control), and also supports serial console redirection and accessing the serial console (both in the OS and in POST) via the management controller.

On their other systems, you can get cards to do the same plus export the local vga display in a vnc-like fashion. I think Dell has some sort of option available too.

Of course, their blade servers are ultimate in easily manageable, vga or serial console via the network, etc...

Of course, there are also x86 boxes that have redundant/hot swap processors, memory, mirrored memory/redundant power supplies, and other niceties for the uber-high-availability-in-a-box sort of thing, but they are expensive.

Of course, your typical 'old Pentium II' doesn't have all this. But you quite frankly often don't need all that for a lot of scenarios. Even when you might, take a few, network them all together, and brush up on HA cluster configuration. One box completely dies, well, HA handles things so you maintain that reliability. For even 4 systems in a failover configuration, you still undercut the cost of the equivalent power/sparc/parisc/itanium system.

I *really* don't understand why OpenBoot is considered the end-all be-all. BIOS is ugly and hideous, but OpenBoot isn't such a compelling feature anymore in the face of other mechanisms to work around the traditional failings of BIOS. grub does most of what openboot gives, and the netbooting of a system via PXE combined with pxelinux is actually less painful in some ways than the bootp/tftp approach of OpenBoot. Argue for systems management implementations, for innate hardware failover mechanisms, for raw performance, elegance of the archtecture, for innate virtual machine capabilites (i.e. LPAR), but OpenBoot isn't anywhere close to being *THE* thing that makes a box more manageable or reliable.

Re:I recycle more than they do..

[pair-a-noyd]

You don't know much do you. The website is only a formality.

Those prices on the website mean nothing at all.
I end up selling laserjets for $20-50 each to local around town. Never sold one single item through the website, though I would like to.

I do not charge a pick up or recycling fee. You bring it to me and I take it, no strings, no fees. You're done with it then for good.

I have GIVEN AWAY HUNDREDS of CRT's and printers away to people, churches, friends, neighbors, etc. totally free of charge, and in many cases I DELIVERED the equipment to the recipient.

If on some occasions I go to the effort to do a COMPLETE refurbishment those prices on my website are what I ASK, but not what I GET. The price includes a 90 day warranty. I put the equipment back into LIKE NEW CONDITION.

However, in most cases I only have to do light cleaning on the equipment and sell it CHEAP or give it away AS IS with no warranty.

When I sell it AS IS, you pick it up from me with no warranty and you get CHEAP equipment.

It's all good stuff and WORKS. No junk, just older stuff but all in good working condition.

You have no clue on earth what I do so why don't you just sit down and shut your mouth.

Re:bill? Ahahahaha.

[evilviper]

Corporations don't have hearts, and neither do boards or executive officers. They do it because they want to sell more stuff and want the PR points- it's pure greed.

Thankfully, that's not true.

There are lots of companies that do things out of simple charity, and the desire to do something positive for the community. Now, I have to admit, it used to be infinitely more common before giant evil conglomerates took over, and started killing kittens to make another cent every quarter. However, there are still a few companies around that aren't evil.

Re:stuff owns us

[christopher240240]

Finally after a storm and power outage, the site is up at powerpcmac.com/slashdot.html [powerpcmac.com]