Ready, Set, Green Week One: Electronic Overload

Though I love my green iPod mini, my girly pink cell phone, and our DVR, I've never been that into electronics. I like what they do for my life, but an afternoon at Best Buy? Not my idea of a good time.

My husband Mike, on the other hand, would spend every afternoon in the electronics department if his job schedule (and our budget) would allow it—which is how we wound up with the 42" flatscreen, the Nintendo Wii, the MacBook Pro, two cell phones (plus his work Blackberry), two Bluetooth headsets, a satellite radio, a Palm Pilot, a GPS, and three digital cameras, all of which we use on a regular basis. I begged him to skip the combination Blu-Ray/HD DVD player and wait until one of those technologies won out, and am still trying to convince him that we don't need a digital video camera just yet.

This is why I was not exactly surprised to read about how electronic waste--or e-waste--is such a huge recycling issue. Every one of those devices that we own replaced one—or sometimes two—of the same product that we bought before and now have no idea what to do with. When Ready, Set, Green says "[a]n estimated 75 percent of our obsolete electronics—about 500 million gadgets—is stored unused," I get the feeling that the writers took a tour of my parents' spare room.

My next goal is to find donation spots for all these old electronics so they can be reused, or at least the metals in them can be reclaimed and the toxins kept from doing any damage. For my parents in Pennsylvania, who list two former dorm-room televisions, my college laptop, a handful of hard drives, a computer joystick, and a DVD burner among their e-waste, I track down a Philadelphia-area recycling company, and send my mom the info for scheduling a pick-up. We set up our old desktop computer at Mike's parents' house, where it replaces a decade-old Gateway. And while everything else we've gotten rid of recently looks like it's been accidentally trashed, I pull together a few numbers and websites for local recycling companies so that when he finally gets that new DVD player, we know what to do with the old one.

Learn more about how to recycle electronics
Recycle Your Electronics Easily at Big Retailers
Clean Up, Prepare Your Old Computer Before You Donate It

More about choosing green electronics when you buy
Score Your Electronics With Greenpeace's Updated Scorecard
BuyGreen: Desktop Computers

More about e-waste:
Encourage E-Waste Recycling in Your Workplace

Buy the Book
Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living

Blythe Copeland is a freelancer writer living on Long Island. Read more about her foray into the green life in her Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living.