Arsenic, mercury, lead, beryllium; it's a cocktail that gets poured into the earth for every computer or monitor that sits in a landfill and erodes.
"It's pretty nasty stuff," says Charles Brennick, the founder of InterConnection, who, with partners Earth Corps and the Environmental Coalition of South Seattle, are sponsoring an electronics recycling drive on Saturday, April 29.
The drive, held at InterConnection at 124 N 35th Street in Fremont, will accept electronics in the form of computers, monitors and TVs, from individuals and small businesses. There's a recycling fee ranging from $5 for computers to $25 for TVs, but these are comparable or, in some cases, less expensive than what it would cost you to have the city recycle them. Working computer and monitor donations are tax deductible, too. Proceeds and computers from the event will benefit EarthCorps and InterConnection in their efforts to foster environmental awareness and provide computers to underserved areas throughout the world.
"About 75% of e-waste is still in people's closet. They either don't want to pay or don't know where to take it," Brennick says.
What makes electronics so dangerous for the environment is their reliance on heavy metals. Lead is the worst polluter, and several pounds of it can be used for leaded glass in monitors. But that doesn't mean flat screen monitors are safe. Flat screens, along with computers and traditional monitors, contain mercury, which can also seep into groundwater through a land fill, and is extremely toxic.
Add to all that the practice of planned obsolescence, where computer makers engineer products to serve a brief lifetime so they can make way for more innovative replacements, and you have a robustly toxic industry.
So get into the closet and pack up all those machines. Refurbishing them or "seeing how they tick" is the last thing on your priority list and they're way too old to be networked for Halo tournaments. Get them to InterConnection, at the center of the universe, on April 29. It's for some great causes, including Earth.
For more information or to volunteer with InterConnection, call Brennick at (206) 310-4547 or visit the web site at http://www.computers.interconnection.org/ecycleearthcorps/
