Your Recycle Bin For Money Or Environment

Computers recycling is highly desirable, but so difficult that it is surprising that as many as 20% of computers are recycled. The rest go into the toxic waste in landfill. And when I’m talking about toxic waste, how does four and a half pounds of lead in each computer sound?

And lead isn’t even the most toxic substance in what is coming to be known as e-waste. Your computer isn’t just the main box. It also has monitors, printers, hard drives and circuit boards.

Nearly a quarter of your computer is plastic, which is slow to break down, but toxins leach out of it when used as land-fill. I see distinct possibilities for recycling ferrous metals which make up nearly a third of the weight. If you used an electric screwdriver you should be able to remove most of the attachments to the frames quickly, and sell the metal for salvage. Even the screws should mount up gradually and sell easily by weight.

Non-ferrous metals take up less than a fifth of the weight and aren’t for the amateur to recycle, because many of them are toxic. If you dumped all the circuit boards and components into an acid bath, you would remove all the copper and solder, and be left with a mixture of metals, but you would need to be a chemist to know what to do with them.

Glass is only about a seventh of the weight and I have no suggestions for recycling it.

You should never dispose of computers with your household rubbish because they have so many toxins that they can be considered to be toxic waste. Many non-profit organizations will look after recycling computer hardware for you, either by returning to manufacturers to recycle all the metals and glass and other components, or by reusing them.

Computer manufacturers should be prepared to recycle computer parts by “demanufacturing” them - the reverse of manufacturing, and some governments are encouraging this procedure.

Computer Recycling For Thrift or Profit

OK, That’s dealt with the goodie-goodie considerations of the ecosystem. Now let’s think how to recycle computers just to save money or to make money.

You can gather information that you shouldn’t have, by collecting all the computers that people throw out, and examining the hard drives. Many people delete everything from their hard drives, but don’t realize that it is still in the recycle bin of their computer. Some people even know to empty the bin, but that doesn’t remove the files from the hard drive - only removes the index to them.

Other people format the hard drive. That protects it from the casual amateur, but there is plenty of software to computer recycle in this blackest of black fashion.

So if you are disposing of an old computer, download a free copy of a program that
will wipe you disk thoroughly (or take an axe to your hard drive).

Now my favourite approach to computer recycling is to find ways to reuse things. My friend has an old 368 computer that does nothing except record earthquakes, so that people like him all over the world can pinpoint the exact location of the epicenter of each tremor. It’s a waste of a computer, but it’s recycling computers in the best of possible ways.

Computers are designed so that they will become unusable. You can’t buy a printer for a computer that uses the old printer parallel connector socket. If you have an ancient computer - what can you do without a printer? Well you could mount the monitor somewhere and have an ever-changing picture display on it, instead of a static picture hanging on the wall.

Most reuse ideas require you to have some technical knowledge. For instance you could use most old computers to control your house lighting and temperature and burglar alarms You could switch on lights at night when people were present and not when they left the room. You could keep changing which rooms were lighted to puzzle burglars, and you could switch on a recording of the frantic barking of two doberman dogs, that got louder as anyone got closer to the doors or windows of your house.

All this is possible for computers recycling. The only problem is that you need the technical know-how.

If you have the knowledge, and a utility vehicle, you can go round the annual rubbish collection for all the computers that have been thrown out, and fix them up by borrowing parts from each of them. Wipe the hard drive securely and sell each working computer. Why am I not excited? If you want to earn $50 per hour you have to find enough computers while you are driving round, then do the repair work quickly enough, then do the selling with little enough effort, then complete the paperwork quickly enough. It’s possible if you are a fast worker, but I prefer the idea of recycling cell phones to make money.