Monday, January 7, 2013

Electronic-waste event on Saturday

The county, city, the West Knoxville Optimist Club and the Knoxville Volunteer Rescue Squad are partnering up this Saturday for the “plug-in your community” electronic-waste recycling event.

Yeah, that's what I said, too. Huh? Wha-?

Well, apparently you can take all your old computers, printers and other electronic junk and drop it all off Saturday – rain or shine – between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. at Chilhowee Park in the Midway Parking lot on North Beaman Street.

The event is free and includes drive-thru service, so you don't have to hang out. Those who participate are eligible to win a wide-screen TV from Best Buy, which you'll eventually no doubt be lugging down to the next electronic-waste recycling event in a year or two.

Please note that you cannot drop off refrigerators, air condition units, smoke detectors, light bulbs, stoves and electronic equipment containing hazardous chemicals.

For more information, click right smack here.

Or you can just throw all the junk off your porch and into your neighbor's yard in the middle of the night. Not that I'd know anything about that.

1 comment:

Brian Paone said...

Or - third option - you can recycle all that old tech for cash.

It's what the company collecting this stuff does, anyway. And they get paid six ways to Sunday to do it. Here's how it works:

- Recycling company lands a contract with a municipality to host a "free recycling event" that tries to paint that old tech as "worthless" "dangerous" and any one of a number of other hyperbolic labels designed to get as many rubes as possible to the event with their obsolete stuffs.

- Company gets free raw materials from said rubes without offering to pay said rubes even so much as a pittance for taking the time to load up those vehicles with junk, drive it to the company's event at their own expense, and then lug it out of the car and into the bin. (Some companies even make the rubes do the sorting. That's just overkill in my mind.)

- The company in question makes a killing off of "recycling" what they get - which, in most cases, means light-if-any refurb and stripping computers down to base components.

Did you know that a few pounds of motherboard/CPU/RAM scrap sold for gold can fetch upwards of $100 on eBay? No kidding. I used to do it all the time until I ran out of stuff to recycle.

Because of companies like this.

Too bad. I actually paid folks for their crap. You won't see that out of these kinds of events. Sad, really. -bp