e-Waste Land

I spent part of my Saturday in a wasteland–an e-wasteland, that is. You see yesterday was the household hazardous waste drop-off day for my county, a day when you could get rid of items that would cause lots of toxic problems if you’d tossed them in the trash. Since I’d missed the day last year, I’d been holding on to a couple of things to get rid of.

First, there was an old television set–”Wow, Mom, this is really old–the TV has dials!” my older daughter exclaimed when she was helping us to load up the car. Then there were two desktop computers we’d purchased for the girls when they were really little but were just unusable now. In case you’re wondering why I didn’t just donate those old computers to a local school or good cause, well, I tried. But because those PCs were running Windows 95 and didn’t have Internet connections, no one wanted them. Also, we had three old-fashioned thermostats, filled with mercury, that we needed to dispose of. They were what came off the walls when we’d installed programmable thermostats in the house.

Yesterday’s drop off was at a local technical school, which is about 10 miles away from my house. I thought I’d remembered reading in the newspaper about last year’s hazardous waste drop-off day and the tons of people that showed up, but it wasn’t until I crested a hill near the school and saw the lines of cars–and the handful of police cars set up to help direct traffic–that I had any idea how many people go to these things.

It was 12:45 p.m., and I almost didn’t make the right turn into the school. The line of cars was intimidatingly long and because it was close to 95 degrees out yesterday, the idea of idling in that kind of long line didn’t appeal to me on many levels (comfort, carbon emissions and otherwise). However, I knew I wanted to properly dispose of my e-waste and this was my only chance. So I turned off the air conditioning, rolled down the windows, and turned on NPR to wait it out.

The campus of the school where they held this event is deceiving large, with a long winding driveway and tucked-away parking lots, through which people like myself had to snake before reaching the actual drop-off point. In the picture at right, I was already 20 minutes into the line and could count close to 50 cars in front of me and nearly that many behind me.

Surprisingly, the event was very well organized so that soon enough, the one line of cars split into two and things really started to move along. At one point it looked like I was ready to approach the drop-off point and be done with this, but then I noticed that the two lines wound around the back of the school and back around to the right again.

From what I could tell from the trucks I saw on the campus, my county had contracted with Clean Venture/Cycle Chem, an environmental contractor that knows how to properly dispose of hazardous waste. It seems that this company, which has locations in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey, partners with municipalities all the time to hold resident recycling days for items that you can’t normally put out with your trash.

Just before I got to the drop-off point, someone from the county’s planning commission (which had sponsored the event) stopped to ask me a few market-research questions–what township was I from, how did I hear about the event, what did I bring with me. Next thing I knew I was told to pull my car up next to shrink-wrapped towers and piles of computer monitors.

I hopped out of the car, popped the trunk, and two very large, football player-looking guys reached into the trunk and took out the two computers and the television. I handed them the box of thermostats, closed the trunk, and I was ready to go. It was 1:32 p.m. That wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected, and at least I can feel confident that I’d done the right thing in properly disposing of my household hazardous waste.

If your local government isn’t forthcoming about when they might be having a hazardous waste collection day, try logging onto the Earth 911 website. On the homepage, you can plug the item you want to recycle, along with your zip code, into the search boxes at the top of the page, and it should bring up a list of places that take this kind of hazardous household waste. (Unfortunately, a search of where to recycle computers in my area brought up Staples, which charges $15 for the privilege. No, thanks. I’ll wait until I can do it for free on one of these household hazardous waste collection days.)

You can also try searching your local government’s website or the website of your state’s department of environmental protection to see if there might be information on there about similar e-waste recycling/collection programs in your area.

POSTSCRIPT: A local newspaper article reported that about 1,800 people showed up for this collection day. No wonder the lines of traffic were so long!