County E-Waste Drop Off - Ethical Question

So, my County just opened and ewaste drop off site last month. This is not a revenue stream for them. They are actually paying an electronics recycler just shy of $15k a year to take the stuff.

I went today for the first time. I dropped off four DVD players, 3 CRTs and a scanner.

This drop off is in an unmanned building. They have pallets and signs indicating where to put stuff. They unlock the door at 9am and lock it at 2 pm.

So my question is ... since it is not a revenue stream and they are paying for removal, do you think doing a swap would be out of line? Say, drop off 5 printers and leave with one PC? I would just love to hear all your opinions on this. Thanks.

This was a problem in the town I work in. People were taking computers, and T.V. sets, the bad part was the people would strip all of the goods out of the items and then return just the shell (tower casing, just the glass screen part of the monitor/t.v.set). Sadly the town closed the drop off point and now the residents need to drive a few towns away to a county landfill to dispose of their electronics.
I would say check with the town or company.

They are probably getting a credit for computers. My work pays $0.17/lbs for crts, $0.00 for printers/etc, but getting a $0.10/lbs credit for computers.

I am sure you could take all you wanted and no one would know or care, except you! I would ask the worse thing they could say to you is no.

As someone who has dealt with drives/collection events at the city and county level, don't do it. The amount of money made after all the CRTs and printers and stupid plastic consumer grade electronics is next to nothing, even when getting paid to recycle them. We just picked up a huge load of stuff a few weeks ago, and the whole time people were trying to drop off the worthless stuff and take the computers.

It's similar but different in this area. The credo is Reduce,Reuse, and Recycle. The prime concern is to address the problem of lead & mercury and see to it that electronics items containing those things are properly disposed of. The big thing is the CRT's. The consensus of the scrappers in this area is that they are strictly off limits. The state pays the larger e-waste companies so much per unit so it's profitable for them.

On the flip side .... the local consensus is that NO towers,desktops,laptops,tablets, or cell phones leave the community intact. Hard drives are either destroyed or wiped with a three pass overwrite that meets DOD standards. Memory cards & other type SSD's are made inoperable. The computers that can be refurbished are either sold or given to a family that's struggling to get by. The ones that are too old are recycled locally in a responsible way and it brings a little more money into the area from the outside world.

If you think about it:

1: The volume of e-waste leaving the community is reduced.

2: Those things that can be reused are refurbished and put back into service.

3: The rest get recycled in a responsible way.

The big problem is that there's an ASSUMPTION that once a computer has been dropped off at the designated spot and picked up by a big recycler that it will be dealt with in a responsible way. The truth is that nobody really knows unless careful oversight is maintained. Laptops are especially labor intensive so it's more likely that they will be palatalized and shipped off to China or some third world nation for recycling. That's a pretty significant export of American data to countries that may not be our friends.

Originally Posted by Scrappah

On the flip side .... the local consensus is that NO towers,desktops,laptops,tablets, or cell phones leave the community intact. Hard drives are either destroyed or wiped with a three pass overwrite that meets DOD standards. Memory cards & other type SSD's are made inoperable. The computers that can be refurbished are either sold or given to a family that's struggling to get by. The ones that are too old are recycled locally in a responsible way and it brings a little more money into the area from the outside world.

If you think about it:

1: The volume of e-waste leaving the community is reduced.

2: Those things that can be reused are refurbished and put back into service.

3: The rest get recycled in a responsible way.

The big problem is that there's an ASSUMPTION that once a computer has been dropped off at the designated spot and picked up by a big recycler that it will be dealt with in a responsible way. The truth is that nobody really knows unless careful oversight is maintained. Laptops are especially labor intensive so it's more likely that they will be palatalized and shipped off to China or some third world nation for recycling. That's a pretty significant export of American data to countries that may not be our friends.

Our county is really small. They had to come up with a solution so this is what it is. The company should do the right thing and wipe hard drives before they resell. It would be a lot better though if something good were to come back to our county from it and that's not going to happen.

This is the recycler's ebay shop sunnking on eBay