British Columbia To Charge Recycling Fee 172
An anonymous reader writes "Next week the province of British Columbia will begin adding a recycling fee to new computers and TVs to pay for their free electronics recycling program. The list of what is acceptable for recycling is short, namely computers, printers, and TVs — you cannot recycle personal audio players or cell phones. What is unclear is whether the definition of 'desktop computer' includes self-built computers, and if so, their plans for adding fees for individual components such as motherboards, etc." The article notes that the recovered e-waste will not be sent to developing countries for processing. But one report says that the e-waste won't be recycled at all, but rather burned in a smelter.
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't know about Moore (I've only seen "Roger and Me" and "9/11"), but many people have that same logic. I hear it all the time and when you try to explain to them that you really do pay for it from your tax dollars, they give this look that I can only explain by an example:
Go to a dairy farm and start talking to a cow. That's the look you get.
They are also the same folks who think that when they get a Federal Tax r
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Good point, calling the recycling program "free" is incorrect. In this case it would be better to call it a deposit on the proper disposal of your electronics. If that $2000 you just spent on your laptop doesn't include the cost to dispose of it then you're basically just assuming welfare from your fellow citizens and/or your descendants to cover the cost of its disposal and cleanup.
Or rather, a deposit on the IMPROPER disposal of your electronics.
Instead of paying a recycling company $10 to actually, you know, recycle your electronics... there will be a government monopoly that will charge you double, and won't actually bother to recycle electronics in any meaningful way (instead they are opting to burn them down in an smelter). This will put the people who actually recycle/reuse electronics in a responsible way out of buisness.
They are charging for "proper disposal", the same way th
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The problem is (and where most libertarian utopias fall apart) is that without an economic incentive
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Two questions:
1. Why is it futile to expect people to take responsible actions for themselves? At some point, for civil society to function, it depends on most people doing the right thing on their own most of the time. Most people would voluntarily take their electronics down to the free-market elect
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The one troubling thing is about how they plan on disp
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Yeah. Destroy it.
I still use an older Compaq laptop (333mhz, 128mb of Ram) as a web server for a not very busy local sports league. It runs an Ubuntu lamp install and has a phpbb forum and about 100 unique visitors per day. Speed of the machine is never an issue.
I also use another old Compaq (233mhz, 192mb of Ram) as a web browsing machine. It's also useful for updating the webserver as all my code I change is done via text edito
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
The collection stations then ship all this electronics to Calgary or Edmonton to be processed. (sometimes, if you work there or know someone there they will let you scavenge)Machines that are still viable are resold to computer dealers like me to be re-used.
Machines that are too old are stripped and the components are sent to the proper place to be recycled. Plastics get melted down, metals get smelted out etc. No, the system is not perfect, but it keeps the old tv's and computers out of our land fills.
Hopefully B.C. isn't re-inventing the wheel and they will have a similar system.
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Well, based on what at least one of TFAs said, they're not going to. They're just planning on handing everything over to a group of electronics manufacturers, who'll then ship everything to a smelter to be incinerated.
Good way to eliminate the secondary market for electronics.
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To an extent. They usually use about the same amount of power, but newer machines do far more with the power they do use.
For the previous poster - his website could probably be hosted on basic enterprise level machine with at least a thousand other small time websites. I wouldn't be surprised if you could host a hundred thousand with load balancing between five servers. Individ
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The best thing to do with an old PC is to try and find a new use for it (or sell it to someone who can use it). If disposal is free, it will, in many cases, become cheaper to simply let the government dispose of it.
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But I am in BC, and not eager about the chance to pay more for my electronics. Hopefully they don't fill in the internet hole for a while.
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However it also removes the incentive for illegal disposal so depending on the situation in the country it may be worth the tradeoff.
Except that there is no real difference between the legal and illegal disposal. It is not like they are running a proper recycling program. They are just incinerating the old computers. Not much difference between that and just throwing the PC in a dumpster with the rest of the trash.
If they are going to be charging for "proper disposal", maybe they should actually properly dispose of the things.
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As long as it has no other negative effects; take a look at "intellectual property", which is the ultimate privatized taxation scheme. The burden of paying for the system is shifted to the consumer, but the producer has no interest at all in providing the economy with the most efficient solution to the problem, but rather uses it to maximize revenue strea
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Doubling the benefits if I die by accident is a good example. It's utterly beyond me why I would want that, yet sure in hell it costs me money.
Having done the taxes for many people I work with (Score:2)
Some people genuinely do have negative tax return figures, and when filing, get more than they paid in over the year- a net negative for federal over the year.
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It's called Michael Moore logic. If the government provides it, it's by definition "free".
No, you right-wing retard, it is called common sense. If the government or anyone else provides it for no charge, it is by definition free. Mentioning that a good or service is free to the person receiving it does not imply that the good or service materialised out of thin air or is not paid for at some other point along the chain.
If you stop me in the street and ask me for directions, and I help you out without asking for a fee in return, I am giving you a free service. It is irrelevant that you as
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Did you miss the entire discussion? I went into some detail about how not paying for something you receive means you've got it for free.
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My point still stands. NOTHING the government provides is free. There's always a price hidden somewhere - usually a quite outrageous one.
Let's take federal school subsidies. These are programs where schools get money from the feds for this or that, such as new computers, textbooks, security guards, whatever.
Because of the complexities that are federal programs only a third of the dollars that congress provides to the department reach the school. The rest are eaten up
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Making all the costs hidden tends to encourage overconsumption, which ends up costing more money. When it's distributed like a government health care plan would be, it ends
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If you stop me in the street and ask me for directions, and I help you out without asking for a fee in return, I am giving you a free service. It is irrelevant that you as a consumer or a taxpayer are part of a system that has, for example, provided us with streets to talk about, or which has provided me with healthcare to be able to be there. It is also free even if I decide I will only grant these requests if other people have similarly helped me out.
Now this analogy falls apart when you compare it to how government programs REALLY work. The government doesn't have random helpful people walking around giving out stuff free of charge. Instead the government has PAID employees whose JOB it is to provide services for you. These people get paid from money which you gave to the government in the form of TAXES. There is nothing for free, if the government doesn't collect taxes then these people don't get paid and then th
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No, you right-wing retard, it is called common sense. If the government or anyone else provides it for no charge, it is by definition free. Mentioning that a good or service is free to the person receiving it does not imply that the good or service materialised out of thin air or is not paid for at some other point along the chain.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory but frankly, with that kind of argument it seems you're more likely the retard than he.
You clearly have forgotten the purpose of government and the manner in which it is supposed to go about doing that purpose.
The basic premise of government is to form a collective which is empowered by "people" to run certain affairs on their behalf, right? And the manner of providing funding is typically through control of the land/air/sea/etc resources and of late - taxation and more ta
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The "out of thin air" definition o
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The basic premise of government is to form a collective which is empowered by "people" to run certain affairs on their behalf, right?
Indeed. Which makes it not a corporation taking money in strict exchange for products, but instead a very different public body that does public service with one hand, and takes taxes with the other in order to handle inflation. (Remember that the state can print as much money as it likes, so taxation is purely to keep the overall amount of money out there from spiralling upwards.)
And the manner of providing funding is typically through control of the land/air/sea/etc resources and of late - taxation and more taxation. That means that anything, ANYTHING for which tax moneys and government revenues were applied are paid services.
So, if you don't leave any rubbish outside, or if you don't use the streets much, the state lowers your taxes accordingly?
Printing money is taxation, kinda (Score:2)
Actually printing money is a form of taxation. Whoever gets to print the money taxes the rest who don't. Think about it.
It is a great advantage to the USA that so many countries trade in US dollars, and many keep billions of it in reserve. A vast amount of USD is outside the USA.
1) The US Gov can print more money and automatically "tax" everyone else (incl
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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The former. With the latter, you've paid for things even if you don't want them, so you end up forcing yourself to use them, even if you don't really like them. You're effectively trapped there, you can't go anywhere else because you've paid for being there.
Not to mention all-inclusive resorts generally have the atmosphere of holiday camps.
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It's called Michael Moore logic. If the government provides it, it's by definition "free".
It'll be free to some people. People who can't afford new computers will get used, and then when it gets so old that it's completely unusable or it breaks, then they'll have something to do with it without spending money that they don't have. If I buy a $2000 computer from Dell I'm not going to notice $5 or $10 for recycling, so I'd rather pay it upfront than have to spend it later or push the cost onto some poor person or organization I donate it to later.
Of course, that would be great if they where
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Okay, cool, got it: no additional costs for people when they use a hospital.
But then right afterward, he does this whole sequence where he shows all this cash being handed out, highlight
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Conversely, you pay for the 'free' recycling program, w[h]ether (a) you use it, (b) you have any need to use it, or (c) a bunch of other people use it.
Which supports what I'm saying: that it's not a transaction. It's a service for society as a whole provided by society as a whole.
Consequently it's a clear example of a tax burden placed unfairly
Your silly right-wing opinion regarding its fairness is rather irrelevant in the discussion about the meaning of the term "free of charge".
All your sweetness and light
Why, thank you.
Are you a civil service worker or a government bureaucrat? Or just one of their 'useful idiots'?
Have you stopped beating your wife? [wikipedia.org].
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There is a reason they call it Vancouver B.C. --> Vancouver, Bring Cash
charging for free service??? (Score:2)
On a more serious note, there is more value to be extracted from electronic junk then for the same weight of ore in mining.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for improving the recycling process and maybe adjust the manufacturing process to accomodate the end life cycle of recycling.
not news (Score:5, Informative)
It could also soon be charged in Ontario:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2007/06/12/42
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Of course, whether it makes sense to do so will not matter to the Ontario government. What matters is it doesn't cost them anything, and it makes them look like they've done something for the environment.
Consider, for example, how quickly the Ontario passed a ban on incandescent lightbulbs after the idea was first raised in Australia.
- RG>
Nightmare for vendors (Score:4, Informative)
Then Sask jumped on, now BC, and soon all the rest of the provinces.
But, and it is a BIG "BUTT":
We now have to collect separately for each province we sell into, report each month to each province, remit to each province
The paperwork for this equals one person-day per month for all the reporting and filing.
This is a classic example of what should have been done at the federal level, and now is more of a burden than a benefit.
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This fee is already charged in Alberta for the last couple of years. It was also introduced in Saskatchewan in February.
While quite true. Why not do a complete job and have the prison system take ALL garbage, sort it into recycle. Aluminum here, paper there, biodegradable here, electronics there in stead of sitting on their asses for release date.
And cut yet another form of taxation. GST+PST+EST is getting tax nuts. Almost 20% not including excise. As it IS about TAXES -- they want more of YOUR mone
wanted: universal translator (Score:2)
what's truly ever so head-scratching is this author's command of grammar.
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Ah, beautiful Trail, BC [metsoc.org], industrial jewel of the soot-and-arsenic laden mountains.
Not New (Score:4, Interesting)
How did they think it would be recycled? (Score:5, Informative)
But dropping it in a smelter is recycling. Junk goes in, refined metal comes out. Smelters do not run on solid fuel anymore, they can't grind up the circuit boards and feed them to the burners.
The organics will burn in the charge, the fiberglass will melt into the slag, the metals will dissolve into the melt.
I forgot how to separate the lead from the copper. (pyrometallurgy class was in 1988, and I went the hydrometallurgy route instead)
Now I'll have to look it up.
The pyro class took a field trip to Trail, neat place if you are into displays of brute power. Sometimes I miss mining. Phys met is so boring; did it corrode
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If it's profitable to obtain raw metals in this fashion, why do they need to charge a fee to do it?
You don't need to charge a fee to recycle aluminum cans. Well before recycling was widespread in the US, I remember hauling garbage bags full of empties down to a local recycling center, which then paid *us* for delivering valuable aluminum to them. If nobody's willing to pay you for your old
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Likewise, despite being cheap, you've gotta make sure the lead is disposed of properly, along with the various other nasty material that goes into making CRTs and capacitors.
Silicon's so chemically inert that you may have trouble re-processing it efficiently.
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It's not really that hard either given a properly set up smelter. Besides, they have to do it anyways [miningbasics.com] even when working with raw ore.
Likewise, despite being cheap, you've gotta make sure the lead is disposed of properly, along with the various other nasty material that goes into making CRTs and capacitors.
Who's talking about disposing of it? Lead, despite being toxic, is still a val
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Who said it was profitable? The raw materials value and energy produced may be worth less than the cost of running the operation. However, it reduces the expense of landfilling the items, and reduces the amount of certain unpleasant chemicals in the landfill. It also might encourage the reuse of certain parts of the system (say, doing a motherboard swap instead of buying a new system) which would further re
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So I get to pay a fee to reduce the expenses of a landfill company? That's nothing less than a subsidy to the guy running the landfill.
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Landfills are typically government run, AFAIK. If they're not, they're generally government or neighborhood contracts, and get paid by the amount dumped. So you're reducing your tax bill, not giving a private enterprise money.
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MRF's need to make money to operate, and it can either be through material recovery or from funding/fees/deposits or a combination of both. So in many cases, MRFs are only allowed access to the aluminum in blue boxes on the condition they recycle the glass (little profit) and paper (no profit, really) as well. It's not really worth their time. In the same way, I suspect that while some PC components are qui
Burning in a smelter is stupid.... (Score:2)
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Lead is worth good money. When I toured the Trail smelter it had a lead side and a zinc side. I'm not sure how much mercury there is in the electronic scrap, but it should be recoverable. And if you can collect it, all these compact fluorescent lights need it to work. So that will recycle too.
California Has Done This (Score:4, Informative)
4-15 inches : $6
15-35 inches: $8
35+ inches : $10
The fee is not a deposit either, like you have on soda cans. If you take your CRT to the dump later, even if you can prove you paid that E-Waste fee, you still have to pay the dump to take your trash.
More Info: http://www.erecycle.org/ [erecycle.org]
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Had you have taken your stuff to a county dump, they'd have charged you their normal fees.
At least, that's how it is here in San Joaquin County. But if we give our stuff to Waste Management, it's free.
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The whole point of assessing this fee is so that waste collection sites will take these products without hassle and I have had no problems
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It was an official county site, so I'm sure they'd have to participate. It's not like I could really argue with the person though.
Thanks!
Why do they call it recycling.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why do they call it recycling.... (Score:4, Informative)
No, they're melted down and leeched into seperate metals.
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With a well-designed process you can get pretty good efficiencies out of the smelter and also keep emissions into the environment at a low level. With modern smokestack scrubbers and effluent recovery systems you can re-capture elements that you can turn around and sell in orde
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After all, that's what many places will do with cars.
Smelter != Incinerator (Score:2)
A smelter isn't an incinerator.
A smelter is the thing that's used to take ore and turn it into usable metal. You know, like the thing in T2 that Arnold jumps into at the end.
Sounds like they've decided the easiest way to extract the metal from the electronic waste is to burn off everything that isn't metal, then separate the metals back out.
Now, there may be questions about how environmentally sound it is to burn off plastic and fiberglass, but this is definitely recycling.
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Other Electronics? (Score:2)
Seriously, ISTM that a recycling program which takes all electronics would be a better idea. Otherwise this other stuff will just go into a landfill.
Just another "Fear Me!" article from the ignorant. (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally people have no clue what happens in the mining industry, how metals are actually extracted from the ground and refined. I LOVE it when I see people protesting the mining industry in general, while using their cell phones, full of metals, while wearing clothes that were made on metal machines, with their metal car or bike parked nearby. They have no clue. It's great fun showing them the irony of their actions.
This ignorant FUD article is no different.
If it wasn't for smelters, the computer parts being recycled would never have existed in the first place! but people read the headlines and just assume the worst.
What happens when you recycle a pop can?
What happens when your car is recycled?
What happens when to pretty much any metal product when it is no longer useful?
It's about time the same happened to computer parts.
The government of British Columbia used to sell surplus computers and monitors as scrap.
The news media here caused great embarassment to the BC government a few years ago when they exposed the fact that the scrap ended up in the shocking Chinese 'recycle' system we've all seen on TV
So the BC government actually did something about it.
Smelting it here in BC in a controlled manner where emissions are regulated, where thousands of people will NOT have their lives greatly shortened by the process, where ground water, lakes, rivers, and soil will NOT be destroyed by the process, sounds like a much better system to me.
Mod parent up - nicely said (Score:2)
People have to grow up and realise throwing away stuff has consequences. Well done to BC for taking responsibility of their own rubbish rather than messing up some third world country with it.
As an aside, I heard that its becoming more profitable to recycle scrap than to mine for some metals, is this true? As in, it's cheaper to melt down and process X weight of proce
Alberta already has e-waste fees (Score:2)
Television (18" and smaller) $15.00
Television (19"- 29") $25.00
Television (30" - 45") $30.00
Television (46" and larger) $45.00
CPUs (including mouse, keyboard, cables, speakers.) $10.00 (basically, $10 for your entire computer)
Printers/printer combos $8.00
Laptops/electronic notebooks $5.00
Computer monitors $12.00
http://www3.gov.ab.ca/env/waste/ewaste/index.html [gov.ab.ca]
And if it means all these electronics are going to be recycled/reused in a more efficient manner, I
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The rest is quite low density and, a side from a few hot spots, is quite spread out.
Even if they aren't covered by the program, or choose not to take advantage of it because of distance, etc, it won't be a significant impact.
Mod Parent Down (Score:4, Informative)
This is nothing but FUD. BC is 357,216 square miles and contains 4.3 million people (note: I did not verify the parent's numbers, but they seem reasonably correct from memory). On the other hand, California, Nevada, and Oregon put together contains 39 million people. That's almost a 10x difference.
Also remember, the population of Vancouver, Victoria, and the next 3 largest cities in BC total 2.8 million. That's 65% of the entire population of the province, with Vancouver comprising 2.1 million of the total alone. I'm pretty sure the recycling program exists THERE.
Given how dense Victoria, Vancouver, and its outlying areas is (after all, the whole region is walled in by mountains), 70 locations is not outrageous, and can in fact cover a LOT of people's recycling needs.
So take the "blatant thievery" and shove it, unless you have some real proof of a conspiracy to steal taxpayer dollars.
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Nobody insinuated that rural residents don't have computers, or are too dumb to have computers, or any such trash. You are attacking a straw man that doesn't even exist. I suspect part of your problem with "right wing dumbasses" like myself (though I consider myself quite far left), is more so with your perception with how they think of you, rather than what they actually think of you.
The mere reality of it is that Vancouver, Victoria, and related areas are far more densely packed. A single recycling cent
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This is one of those cases of "lying with numbers".
It's quite possible to cover the vast majority of the people with so few stations - because most of BC is utterly empty
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Of course if the NDP in general had any business sense, they wouldn't have more than doubled our provincial debts while claiming their budgets were balanced.
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At a rough guess, 20-30 loc
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Personally... I prefer:
At least as the proper definition... But that may just be me...
Nephilium...
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Dumbass.
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If it weren't for the current liberal government (despite their own flaws) running the province as a business instead of as a socialist w
Paging Dr. Junk! (Score:2)
The outfit I work for [gtesinc.com] went from 500 people to about 20 when the bubble burst, and we had a lot of surplus stuff to get rid of. We ended up selling lots of cool-looking flashing-light junk to movie people for props, cherry-picked a bit for ourselves, and sold the rest to a local guy who specializes in industrial cleanup. He ground up most of it (circuit boards and things) to extract the metals. We promptly christened him Dr. Junk.
Before he got the boards (some quite valuable in their time) we made sure, wi
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Get a clue. Please.
We didn't do it because we were nasty. We did it because if the boards were genuinely scrapped, with no possibility of re-entering commercial service, we got a big tax writeoff. The accountants and tax people are sometimes picky about this.
Besides, it was fun.
...laura
The Collective Good (Score:2)
They re-use old cellphones, pagers, crackberries, etc, by repairing your old phone and then give them to charities. Non-working ones at the least have their batteries recycled. They also have kits available to setup colection stations at your work or elsewhere, and I have seen several collection stations setup that look like USPS mailboxes repainted. Ive sent a few phones their way in the past. Its better than just throwing them out or letting them sit around!
Tm
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