mm wrote:
Baltimore County just started accepting, at one of its solid waste
facilities, tv's, computer monitors, vcr's, and some other electronic
things.

How much recycling is actually done to these things and how important
is it to recycle them?

They always mention lead first as a dangerous substance in tv's and
monitors, but it seems to me, all the lead is in the front panel of
the CRT, and it can't escape to poison the earth. Even if the glass
is broken, only a little surface is exposed, and I'm not sure if even
the lead along that surface can escape.

As to the rest, do they clip out the transistors to recycle the
germanium? How much recycling do they really do? I was told by a
recycler that no one will pay for the stuff, and the counties have to
pay them to come and get it. If it were really recycled, wouldn't it
be worth something?



(The radio didn't say one way or the other if they would now refuse to
pick up such things curbside, as they have been doing.)

Remove NOPSAM to email me..

Turns out, from some sites I saw a few months back and am too lazy to
look up, a lot of the stuff gets sent to third world countries where,
as usual, badly paid and often underage workers get to snarf up lots of
heavy metals and assorted other toxins in order to disassemble the crap
to reclaim the 30 cents of gold plating on the contacts, or some such.
So goeth the world.