Computer Recycling

Recycle all your e-waste and old computers - You Know You Want To

We know the Chinese and the Indians love taking all our e-waste and junk off us and melting it down to extract all that lovely mercury but, really, should we let them? After all we invented the computer so why should they have all the fun?

How to Recycle All those Old Computers?

If you are anything like me you have a house full of old electronic junk gathering dust, particularly computers and computer monitors and even laptops and soon an ebook reader or two not to mention digital cameras. Well all this junk now has a name - it is called e-waste ! I bought my first PC way back in 1985, it had no hard drive but two ! floppy drives, it also had a RAM drive which was very useful, and what is more, I've still got it and it still works, but strangely enough I never use it (probably because of the lurid orange and black screen - the green and black screen died and I had to get a 'new' orange one).

So what do you do with all these old computers? Do you recycle them or just stuff them under the stairs and hope some idiot will steal them?

I read somewhere that 75% of all computers ever bought are still stored in people's houses, a veritable ecological time bomb given all the nasty chemicals they have locked up in them.

So what should we do with them ? Well at the moment the US government sends its old e-waste and other toxic e-junk to Africa, in particular Ghana where kids can make a dollar a day after school burning toxic waste and inhaling all those lovely fumes, and it's all legal (most other countries have signed directives banning the exporting of toxic waste - so any waste they send abroad is actually illegal - so it's nice to learn the US still prefers legality)..

Anyway, instead of shipping all that unloved e-waste to Africa here are my suggestions for what we should do with it. My preferred answer to the problem would be - rocket ships. Just load rocket ships up with all the old electronic junk we have lying around and send them off to the ends of the cosmos (or the sun) (or someone else's sun) - there could even be a system installed to use the computers themselves as rocket fuel. How neat is that?

Alternatively, we could build a huge conveyor belt leading up to the top of a really hot volcano and just tip everything in, I'm sure it would melt and if we are really lucky the volcano might be so hot it would destroy any nasty gases.

Method number 3 would be to scrunch all the computers and monitors up into small pieces and stuff them down all the holes we have made drilling oil wells. There must be plenty of oil wells that have run out of oil and have just left a big gaping void somewhere in the middle of the earth. So just fill up the voids with old computers and I'm sure eventually over time the plastic would be re-converted back into oil and we could use it all again ! Excellent!

Method 4 (the cheap version) take it all to the dark side of the moon and dump it - no need even to dig a hole and who would ever know.

Method 5 develop some sort of bacterium that eats plastics and nasty metals and farts out methane which we could put in cars and aeroplanes and the like.

Method 6 make power plants that actually convert old junk and recycle computers etc.. into electricity and stuff the fumes down into the previously-mentioned empty oil wells (in fact I think that method may already be in the pipeline).

Method 7 cover them in fish oil and feed them to whales. Whales have been known to be partial to the odd plastic bag or two, so they might quite like a computer to chew on.

Method 8 whenever anybody dies insist that they are buried in a lead coffin along with all their junk.

Well I can't think of any more sensible ideas, but if you have any please leave them in the comments section below.

If you really want to recycle your old computers and electronic junk then you had better check out this place - http://earth911.com/electronics/computers/computer-recycling-and-reuse/ - or have a look at the links below, I'm sure some of them will be useful.