In this country, we have large red public containers for electronic
waste. People can get rid of their old consumer electronics for free
just by throwing it inside and a private Company, that owns the
containers, makes profit from recycling. These containers are
constructed in such way, that when you put something inside, nobody
can get it out, only people from the Company. There are double doors,
sliding mechanisms, etc. - in fact several homeless people already
died while trying to get in for something valuable enough to be sold
in pawn shop.
Before the containers became widespread, each town had its own
solution for electronic waste management and waste management
in general. Of course some of the smallest towns and villages did
nothing and people were throwing their garbage everywhere, but most
towns had a place, opened two or three days a week, where you could
bring your old electronics (and plastic, metals, paper, ...) and leave
it there to be recycled. And usually you could also ask the personnel
to let you look in for something you could have use for. That's how
I've got my first Atari 1040STFM in late 90's (more precisely board,
power supply, floppy and keyboard - the case was already in plastics
container, broken to thousand pieces).
But that's long gone. Now you see just red containers everywhere and
if you live in a town where they still have some kind recycling point
or place, you'll see that inside are again just containers with the
Company logo on them, coupled with CCTV surveillance.
What goes in, never goes out. That's a bit of problem and apparently
not just for me. Even the law says, that the first and most preferred
form of recycling should be reusing. It's only logical, even without
some deep knowledge of economic principles - giving something you have
to someone else to use it again, is more economical and more
environmentally friendly, than sending it via ship to the other side
of world to be separated by material and eventually recycled.
So I'm always happy when I see, that someone didn't want to play this
game and hanged his electronics on the container in a plastic bag or
left it on top/around. I do the same, if I have something still
working or repairable to get rid of. It's no widespread movement and
probably just tiny portion of people do this, but it's a great way of
fighting seriously bad thing.
And also it's how I got for free one analog and one digital camera
and an 802.11b router for my Palm devices in just one month.
And several cell phones in the last year and even two full desktop
PCs (Pentium 4 era) couple of years ago. All of them working and all
of them still had/have some life and use ahead, if not for me, then
for someone else I know.
The golden rule of ecology is Reduce->Reuse->Recycle, meaning: Think
twice whether you need something, before you buy it. When you don't
need it anymore, try to find someone, who might need it. And if
there's no-one, then send it for recycling. I'm all for this. Just
companies like the mentioned Company probably are against, because it
means less profit for them.
