With $5/gallon diesel right arround the corner, I wonder what the break even point would be to ship this stuff to recycle facilities.

I say bravo Best Buy for taking one for the environment & consumer but I won't hold my breath on this lasting.

jchasse

The only downside I see is that they're not doing it in my area.

Of course, it's only a couple miles further to haul stuff to my local recycling center, rather than BB...

ideaman2020

@Purple Dave: One man's junk, is another person's... trash?

@MerlynNY: Heh. They use a chipper for that.

ripfire4

maybe they can recycle Sharper Image first, after themselves./

flyboy

My town has a yearly recycle day. I tossed an old 55 inch Rear projection TV last year for free..

iPhoneGroupie

Great news!

You can find the complete list of stores on the Best Buy News Site: [bestbuy.tekgroup.com]

LoopTrack

@ripfire4:

I've got three words to answer your question: "Will it blend"?

Haven't seen them blend a 32 inch TV yet :D

MerlynNY

Okay, so Wisconsin (20th largest state) but not Illinois - (5th largest state in the country). Sony was doing the same thing with their recycling / money off deal. BTW, South Dakota is the 46 most populated state in the union. Did the powers that be at Best Buy consult a dart board for this program?

Munch

@LastGunslinger: Take the UPS batteries to Home Depot or an automotive place (like PepBoys or Checkered). You can also check with APC for the address of a local recycler of their UPS batteries (I ship expired batteries on THEIR tag included with new battery).

SigmundTheSeaMonster

@ripfire4:
If it still works, it might end up being "recycled" into a new home.

Purple Dave

This should be a dream come true for best Buy employees able to rummage through the trash. They'll be swimming in dual-casette decks and Series 1 Tivos!

RalphWiggum

I hope they expand the program to cover the entire nation. I live in Jacksonville, one of the biggest cities in land area in the US. The city only has one e-waste drop off spot, which is about 20 miles away from where I live. Other than that, my options are paying for removal or putting it out with the normal trash (which I'm certain is what 99% of people around here do). I've managed to make a couple trips to dispose of my personal e-waste, but there's items at my office I'd like to recycle too. My company donates the old computers to schools and charities, but there's other stuff. I'm trying to find somewhere nearby that will take old UPS batteries. In the meantime, I'm keeping them around. I can't bring myself to put them in the dumpster.

LastGunslinger

yeah, you seriously have to wonder what they are going to do with all that stuff. even if they give it to some "recycling facility", what is that facility doing with all the material that is worthless to them.

tucker

@ripfire4: They mine the stuff for gold and copper and get rich!

tamaudio

Best Buy has sponsored some free recycling recently in the Twin Cities, a test perhaps?

tamaudio

We've had some e-recycling days here in the twin cities every so often which always seem to do well. With the correct outfit, people get to drop stuff off for free and the recycler can usually make a couple bucks while doing something good. Just takes the time and planning.

D-Rock78

Echo! ....... Echo!

ripfire4

Why is the 32" TV thing bogus? Most people upgrading from old TVs to new HDTVs probably have CRT TVs, that rarely went above 32" anyways. Even 32" TVS are gigantic, heavy, and a hassle to deal with. Kudos to Best Buy for taking those monsters for free.

Totorototoro

I just wonder where all these electronics will end up once they take it in. I mean it's not like they would just disappear magically.

ripfire4

I'm just wondering where all these electronics will end up once they take it in?

ripfire4

Screens above 32 inches might be pretty heavy if they are CRTs. Best Buy could just be saving the backs of their employees.

DaveExile

around chicago its virtually impossible to recycle your stuff for free. I lost all my electronics due to a fire, but some companies wanted upwards of $350 to take it, they wouldn't even pick it up! After a fire, I didnt have that kinda money to spend so the shop that looked at it to determine what was fixable kept it. I have a feeling though they just put it in the dumpster.

kadtech

"Would you like a warranty with your recycling? You know, to make sure we actually recycle it?"

adamator

@Subterfuge:
Most of it is shipped overseas to China, India, Nigeria, and other countries to extract glass and metals like gold and lead. Not a very clean operation over there either.

Snapper

@Rabid Penguin: hilarious.

BUt seriously, this is totally sweet, if it's legitimately being recycled. All the places around here that will accept anything like that have a big fee they charge you. And since it's usualy some hippy teenager with a bike and a dumpster in the middle of a parkinglot, you have to pay over the phone with a credit card-- no cash or check.
Which has lead to (guestimate) billions of tv's and shitty crt monitors getting stuffed in trashbags and going to the landfill. Which I don't have a problem with until by ballz rot off with cancer because I'm drinkng the arcenic and mercury from yer old B&W with the vice grip tuner.

So anyway, way to go Best Buy, that's one in a row, ya sonzabitches.

Evan394

@RalphWiggum: Um no, I (geeksquad agent) have had to dispose of some things that had resulted in killing me a little part on the inside..... Like a WRT54Gv4, perfect dd-wrt material.

I am also wondering where all this stuff is going. Its not like we have a lot of room for old stuff, we barely have enough as it is for the new. It sure will make customers happy though.

sprice82

In Northern California, public schools have e-waste recycling events very frequently (we went to two or three in the last year alone). These are fund-raisers for the schools, so if you're in an area where these exist, it might make more sense to send your junk there rather than giving it to the goons in the blue polo shirts.

Jeffrey McManus

"Where does the shit go!"

Subterfuge

Better way of recycling (and its free): Put it on the street curb with a big FREE sign on it. (If necessary, drive to the trailer park and do the same thing.)

It's gone like magic!

PigVenus

I don't recycle... I just dig a hole in my backyard to throw my computer parts in. The kids love jumping off the roof into it.

Rabid Penguin

I wondered what was going on at our Best Buy this past weekend with the recycling. On Saturday at our BB, there was guy in a truck picking stuff up for free. It looks like it is only on scheduled days and they sub it out to somebody else (at least at my BB).

In Roseville, CA the city will come around and pick up eWaste for you. Got rid of my dead 21" CRT monitor and some old computer parts that way. No additional expense, and they recycle it for you.

aschneid

"and the 32-inch restriction on TVs is bogus"
Bogus as in not true, or bogus as in stupid?

packetsniffer

Yeah, seriously, where are they recycling these? In those dumps in china where the kids walk around looking for scraps of gold?

Arvin Bautista

All they're going to do is sell it to recyclers at 10-15 cents a pound. That is what the state facilities in my state do. Sometime I buy a (literal) ton of used P4s and make a decent profit selling used parts on eBay.

adven2rous

@Evan394:
"So anyway, way to go Best Buy, that's one in a row, ya sonzabitches."

one in a row is a minnesota twins/vikings/wild/t-wolves winning streak

godwhacker

@adven2rous: Still, if its convenient for the consumer, and nets BestBuy a little extra margin (I'm betting that they're not really expecting to make much off of this, if they do manage to, more power to them), I'm all for it. Making consumers more aware of e-waste, and keeping more dangerous toxic substances out of the ground is good for everyone.

ludwigk

@kadtech:

save it up - once a year, there's a free event in Schaumburg (yeah, yeah, I know, you city folk think going to the suburbs is as bad as hari-kari, but suck it up ;). It's on the Motorola campus, and should be coming up in the next month or so...

asten77

I worked a little over year at a PC Recycling startup a few years back. For the time I worked there, we had a lot of early successes hooking up with major corporations that were having trouble disposing of all the old computing technology they had accumulating in storage. Many had been vexed by the thought of paying money to throw them out (or worse being fined for illegal dumping), and so they simply tossed their old computers, printers, etc. into storage. Sometimes it was a back office, sometimes it was an entire floor in an office building. We told them we'd take it off their hands, free of charge, as well as securely dispose of their data. The data destruction was carried out by yours truly via a sledgehammer in our parking lot a few hours every friday afternoon. Our original model was to sell everything in a storefront, as early on the majority of what we got was laptops (we didnt know how good we had it) and they were relatively easy to move ($150 for a laptop of any type seemed like a great deal). As we expanded we started seeing huge outdated phone servers, massive sun crt monitors, and file cabinet devices we could only recognize as cartridge or tape readers. This stuff was of no use in our area, probably of little use to anyone inside the U.S.. We put it on E-Bay, which worked well to a point. People were expanding on an outdated phone server, they wanted everything we had. Banks still almost all still operate with dot matrix printers, as their carbon copy sheets dont work in most laser printers, so we always had buyers for the really old printers (amused me that banks seem locked in the 1980s as far as their printers went). Hobbyists wanted to recreate the programming enviroment they grew up in, they bought off some of our antique servers and "readers". Still, some things were practically impossible to move. We started talking to actual metal recyclers. It turns out old 386 and 486 chips and boards have more precious metals contained in them than pentiums, those ended up being a good haul for us. These recyclers were better established, companies who had been doing levels of metal recycling in automobiles and construction/ destruction for years. They invested in some heavy duty plastic shredders and they went to work on computer boards. This part of the industry is still pretty primitive, but effective, and they were willing to pay for a lot of the older computers we couldnt even ship to south america (sorry, thats kinda how it went). They paid by the pound, and not well, but it was something. Turn around on this kinda crap has to happen quick or you're sure to lose money paying for the space it takes up unused. No one would touch the monitors. They started piling up. Until we got a letter from a guy my boss only ever referred to as "The chinaman". He would pay us by the pallet, prepackaged by us to be ready to survive the trip via container from NJ to China (loads of 200+). Whatever is in those things, it's anathema to the point that the US doesnt have a real way to handle it. There's sure to be an opportunity for someone if there's any conceivable way to recover usable material safely and efficiently from old monitors (Im gonna go ahead and say the way they do it in china just isnt safe). Also I should note that while I was working there a lot of news came out about the dangers of CFCs inside older computers, and apparently there's a lot of lead on the soldering points as well, from what I've been told. We were not properly equipped with safety gear, as we had none, and really didnt know what we should have (our boss wanted whatever it was to cost less than $20). Now a blind friend of mine works in a local facility sorting old computer equipment for metal recycling, sans gloves or a mask (or sight). I think ignorance of safety is a real hazard in this kind of business. But the entire idea of computer recycling seemed a necessary and viable new industry. By the time I left the company we had all but abandoned try to sell individual items, and were handing over almost all of it to metal recyclers. We even started CHARGING our clients to take the computer waste off their site. Our market was still booming, every day running into another company that had no plans in place for getting rid of their old tech. But whereas I expected to see competitors shooting through the floorboards, no one's pushed a nation-wide business plan, and it appears as though places like Best Buy might well silently take over the market (or at least amongst potential residential customers). While the notion of tech recycling seems like a noble burden, I kinda doubt they'll be doing it for a loss. There's a lot of money to be made...

ClaraNemo

@ClaraNemo: "And the award for longest single-paragraph post goes to..."

But seriously, thanks for sharing. Nice to hear a first-hand perspective.

ideaman2020

@ClaraNemo:

Thank you for cutting through a lot of the dross the eco warriors 'believe'.

Please can a serious journalist on this blog here - use it?

C'mon Wired - this is where you get your stories.

flyboy

They are actually going to sell the stuff and make money. Recycling is a big business now. We think its great that they are trying to help the environment but they are only doing it for the money.

bnutz

whatever they're doing they're not doing it without some financial gain. It's likely some kind of federal tax incentive. Not to mention giving the Kool-Aid drinkers the idea that Best Buy is somehow "green", and therefore should be shopped at over the likes of those evil Walmart stores.

spec24