Free electronics recycling

That's what people in Wisconsin appear to love even more than beer and brats.

Yesterday Dane County offered no-fee recycling of computers, monitors, televisions, radios, toasters, vacuums, and other electronics. I spent Friday night trying to figure out how to extract the hard drives from old Macs. The Performa 575 (4 MB RAM, 14" screen, $1700 in 1994*) was a real challenge. Realizing that it would become trash the next day, I eventually broke several plastic bits with the pliers and finally sat there like a demented dentist holding a drive - only to realize that I had pulled the floppy drive^, not the hard drive.

Yesterday morning I loaded the Subaru with two computers, four printers, two scanners, two microwaves, and assorted other goodies and headed toward the recycling center - and encountered a traffic jam of historic proportions. A double line of cars snaked out of the convention center parking lots onto the side roads and clear back to a stoppage on the beltline from which drivers couldn't even exit. After I returned home, I mapped it out and calculated that there were about 6 linear miles of traffic jam. Figuring 30' per car, that would be 176 cars per mile x 2 lanes = about 2000 cars in a one-hour snapshot of an all-day event.

At the drop site it was like a scene from a strange movie. People were unloading TVs and computers everywhere, and a stadium parking lot the size of several football fields was already covered with electronic gear stacked waist high. Nice computers, huge televisions, flat-panel monitors. As fast as people unloaded, volunteers were transferring the material to pallets, which forklifts were raising into semitrailers.

This morning's paper says that 30-35 semitrailers with a payload of 250 tons were collected yesterday. Lots of locals now have space in their closets, basements, and garages, and lots of toxic metals are now headed toward a proper disposal.

*Why would I have a 15-year-old computer in the basement? Well, for the first 3-4 years after getting a successor it's "maybe I can upgrade the old one." Then, for 4-5 more years it's "perhaps I can sell it on eBay," followed by a few years of "where can I find a charity that would want it," and ultimately the "how do I get rid of this thing?"

^if you're too young to know what a floppy drive is, just look it up.