Big Apple First US City to Require Electronics Recycling
by Warren McLaren, Sydney 
on 02.14.08
The wheels might turn slowly but they get to where they are going, eventually. Three years ago we reported that New York was contemplating the toughest laws in the nation on electronics waste. Today the City Council was to vote on what they call “trailblazing environmental legislation” to make manufacturers responsible for the ‘take back’ of their electronic products, no longer wanted by customers.
Apparently the city’s residents currently dispose of “more than 25,000 tons of discarded TVs, computers and other electronic equipment,” which is hardly surprising because it seems they also buy 12 million electronic gadgets and do-dads every year, amounting to about 92,000 tons in total. In applauding the legislation the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) points out that old electronics account for about 40% of the lead found in municipal landfills as well as mercury, cadmium, and other toxic heavy metals in landfills and municipal incinerators.
But the wheels will continue to turn for a while longer yet, because the ruling won’t become effective until July 2009 when companies need to start collecting old equipment. From July 2010 the Department of Sanitation won’t accept nominated electronic products for collection. Manufacturers must, by 2012, take back 25% (by weight) of their current sales for recycling or reuse, a figure that progressively increases to 65% by 2018. Apple, GE and Tekserve are some of companies who are said to be supporting the initiative. :: New York City Council, via MacDailyNews
See also: Electronics Companies Team Up to Create Mega Electronics Recycling, for an earlier post on other ventures along this line.
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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Well, this is good news, but in the cities I've lived in, you can't throw away electronics. Like the San Francisco Bay Area, you have to dispose of them as toxic waste. I don't know if they get recycled, but they don't get dumped. Passing the burden to the company, on the other hand, puts the expense directly to the consumer, which on this site is a good thing. But does it mean as companies begin to design around reuse/recycling, will we see more disposable or short term products, upping the manufacturing energy draw?
Halleluia!
Now all we gotta do is start paying people for their trash instead of expecting them to donate it.
I know a better way to stop computer waste. GEt programmers to be efficient in their programming.
Most programs if not all are very ineffieiceintly programmed. IF programmers started using all the power of cpus and the computers then we wouldnt need to upgrade all the time thereby less waste.
IF nintendo could do this on their consoles then we can do it on pc's