E-Waste? No Problem.

This is "Timmy."

Timmy is full of e-waste.

Where should Timmy go to put all this e-waste? Is there a place nearby which will take this e-waste from Timmy? Yes, there is! I found ecollective.com through Google, and then Mobius Computers through ecollective. Chris answered my voicemail in under 5 minutes, and within an hour I was dropping off 300 pounds of wires, cables, computers, monitors, and a printer. "If you'd have told me all this was going to fit in that little car I'd have never believed you," said Aaron, the supervisor. He was super friendly and knowledgeable and made the process painless and easy. "The state pays the charges for CRT recycling, since we're a certified recycler."

While The crew at Mobius unloaded Timmy, the other company I'd contacted to get my goodies called me back. Too late! Mobius Computers Corporate E-Waste Recyclers wins this round!

Sustainable Consumption Musings

I'm pondering galvanized pipes.

Oliver Cannell, a student currently studying environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., asked me for a definition of sustainable consumption. I gave him one, and in the writing of it realized that we have, in addition to a constant input of energy from the sun and time from the Universe, an ever-increasing resource in terms of human ingenuity.

We've been transporting water for all of recorded history, and along the way have discovered lead poisoning and hydraulics, created new methods of organizing people and making people pay for something that is inherently free, and other marvels. We've used materials science and social science to solve the problems we encounter.

A lead pipe is completely recyclable, but the side effects of water transported in lead are hard on folks. An steel pipe will rust; dipping it in zinc creates a material that when scratched will heal itself. Unfortunately, the zinc is a contaminant if you want to recycle the steel.

Recycling wasn't as important 150 years ago. Delivering clean water was. Now we believe recycling is important, too. With the power of human ingenuity we'll come up with another material that is "better" than hot-dipped galvanized pipe (or PVC pipe, or ABS, or any of the other non-recyclable materials) for delivering water.

Karl Keeps Me in Line

"Blog liar!"

Surprised, I turn away from making salad for a birthday dinner. "Uh?"

"Blog liar!" Karl repeats.

"What the heck are you talking about?" I ask (choruses of Blog liar! B'liar! erupted from the peanut gallery at this point).

"You made it sound like there was a pile of e-waste laying around. You didn't even mention that I took it to the free e-waste day at the school.

"In fact, they were really glad to see me! I think they'd had a much lighter turnout than they'd hoped for. So when I pulled up and asked for a cart, they all said, 'You need a cart!' I filled all three racks on that cart."

Xena jumps in: "He plays pretty loosely with time on his blog. Of course, he's not that anchored in time to begin with, so it's not like he's doing it on purpose."

Karl said, "Well, right, but you've got a responsibility to your readers. I get it that you wanted to make it personal, but you've got to be accurate."

So the facts are that some of our pile of e-waste was nearly three years old, and some of it was less than a year. We were hiding it under camouflage netting behind and between the rain storage barrels. Karl, God bless him, heard my pain about never finding a free e-waste event until it was over and kept his attention on finding one prior to its ending, and he and I loaded up his van and...

he made that pile go away.

Because sometimes there is "away."

Tired of piles of e-waste

Saving the world on a budget is tough. When a CFL burns out, or the cell phone craps out because you dropped just one time too many, what do you do?

We used to store them until we had enough to make it worthwhile to take them "somewhere." IKEA recycles batteries and CFLs. We have a box labeled "Take to IKEA" with batteries and CFLs in it.

"Let's go to IKEA," Xena will say.

"Yes, let's!" I'll say. "We'll endure the parking lot, the shuffling throngs, the maze of furniture and greenwashing and spend more money!" Invariably, as we get out of the car, one of us will turn to the other, "Didn't you bring the box?"

Clearly, storing batteries and CFLs in a box to take to IKEA is not a solution that works for us.

Another option that doesn't work well for us is to store these things and wait for a free e-waste fair. I always see the notice "Free e-waste recycling at Emeryville High School" on the day after the event. So the e-waste simply piles higher and higher at my home. Soon I will be forced to pay for its removal, and that's not sustainable behavior for my wallet!

But now, from the people who brought us the Pony Express, the USPS is piloting a program to help recycle small items such as inkjet cartridges and cell phones. This is super convenient for us! We just pop our dead lump of plastic and silicon into the little recycling envelope and leave it in our own mailbox.

Convenient, at-home e-waste recycling is a solution that works very well for us.

Recycling at the US Post Office