An easy way to recycle electronics

Posted By Paul

If you're like me you have accumulated a fair amount of electronics that are broken beyond repair, but that you just don't feel right tossing in the trash.

Well there is a great service that Office Depot offers where they do tech recycling. The basic idea is that you go to a store and purchase an etech recycling box. They come in small ($5), medium ($10), and large ($15) sizes and you take them home and fill them with allowed electronics and then you bring them back in and Office Depot takes it from there, sending your electronics to various recycling sites.

It's not free, but it's pretty affordable (especially if you share a box with 2 or 3 friends) plus you don't have to drive all over town finding places to take your various recycled items.

Here is the brochure for the program:
Office Depot Tech Recycling

I bought the large box and I am filling it up now.

E-cycling revisited

Posted by Matt

It's been nearly a year since my post about the costs of e-cycling, in which I complained about having to pay to recycle my computer monitor. For those of you in Oregon who decided to hold on to your monitors until now, I have good news!

I just read an announcement from my garbage service company that the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality implemented the Oregon E-cycles program in January with the intent of providing free recycling of computers (desktop and laptop), monitors and televisions.

Visit http:/www.oregonecycles.org to learn more about the program or to find local drop-off facilities. I was pleased to learn that my previous recycler of choice (Free Geek) is participating in the program and that all participants are required to follow environmentally sound management practices.

Now, if you've made it this far, I'll give you the full disclosure about the costs here. The recycling isn't really free, right? Someone has to pay for it, right? Electronics manufacturers who sell their products in Oregon have been funding the E-Cycles program (whether they like it or not) since 2007, which probably means that those costs were been passed on to YOU the consumer when you purchased these types of products. But considering that we're all paying for the program anyway, let's at least use it to our full advantage.