Electronics Recycling Day

On Saturday I took in some old computer monitors and printers to the recycling center because it was Electronics Recycling Day.

After I unloaded my stuff, I asked how much stuff had been turned in and if I could take some pictures. They were very hospitable, and showed me the boxes of TV monitors and computer stuff that had been collected earlier in the day.

I suspect most of the computer stuff still worked-- the stuff I turned in did. I was a bit sorry to dispose of my twenty-year old ink-jet printer. It was one of the first models that HP made, and you could easily refill the cartridges with fountain-pen ink and a syringe. I bought quite a few bottles of ink back in the 1990s for the printer, until the SJC bookstore stopped carrying the kind of ink that worked. It was shortly after that printer that the manufactures began to give away the printers and charge for the non-refillable cartridges, which made using ink-jet printers expensive. (I have now migrated to a laser printer--it is cheaper and more reliable than the ink-jets and produces better quality printed pages, though it does not do color.) Because I had not used the old printer for at least five years and it was incompatible with any computer made in the past decade, it was time for it to go.

In addition to the pallets in the shed, they had several pallets of wrapped TV sets in the yard.

In case you missed electronic recycling day, there will be another in a year. Or else you can just put out your obsolete and broken electronics with the regular recycling and it will be picked up. (This is what my guide to the building with the pallets--if it is not correct, the people who work for the street department can correct me.)