Trash to Cash

By Gary Dauphin

Most obsolete or surplus consumer electronics end up collecting dust in attics or rusting in landfills. The destination typically depends on how acutely you're afflicted with pipe dreams about reselling your old 286 or Mac Plus. Given the precipitous plunge in the value of computers over time, the landfill is the usual last resting place of old tech.

A 1993 Carnegie-Mellon study bore this out, predicting that, given the over 70 million computers currently humming away in homes and offices, in two or three years the market for fresh-faced, first-time buyers will be saturated, meaning a computer will become obsolete for every one sold. At the current rate of disposal (10 million computers a year dumped in the trash) that puts about 150 million of them in landfills by 2005.

My own most recent "old computer," a Mac Plus which was already nearly obsolete when I bought it in '91, sits in an upstairs closet in my father's house, in fairly decent working order. (Well, the screen does go a little jiggly and black sometimes.) Relegated to disuse by an upgrade of five or six generations, the Plus ended up at the ancestral homestead after my own apartment was burgled and everything else was stolen. The little gray console was as portable as they come, but apparently still not worth the thieves' trouble. They had, no doubt, read the Carnegie-Mellon study and thought it best to leave well enough alone.

Now the Plus keeps company with clogged VCRs, fuzzy televisions, and other derelict household appliances. In the tonier end of the graveyard lie some Atari and Magnavox Odyssey game consoles, a C-64 with a smashed keyboard, and a 286 my father claims "just needs a battery." Unlikely candidates for resale except at a loss (and this is factoring in the cost of the classified ad).

A more plausible way to turn trash into cash is what happens at Eric Buechel's warehouse just outside of Newark. At Advanced Recovery Inc., Buechel and a small staff mine about 600,000 pounds of electronic scrap a month for recyclable plastics, glass, and metals (from aluminum to, of course, gold), reselling the resulting industrial harvest to computer manufacturers. Recycling is an expensive business, but Advanced Recovery finances the environmentally sensitive part of its operation through memory chip resale, buying back and salvaging modules at a rate that makes Buechel one of the largest memory dealers on the Eastern seaboard.

Since 1991, the company's mandate as described by Buechel has been to keep "hazardous materials out of landfills. Electronic scrap tends to have a high concentration of Lead, especially the solder and the glass in the monitors." The cathode ray tubes in TV screens are the second largest source of lead in landfills (after batteries), and glass with high lead content is difficult to recycle. But Advanced Recovery is one of the few companies that can properly recycle an entire monitor. This prevents lead from seeping into groundwater, or worse, "going airborne in incinerators," a phrase Buechel utters in tones usually reserved for medical waste. Although he deals in bulk and charges for disposal services, Buechel is always willing to take a few computers or monitors off your hands.

Another alternative to the landfill involves that old tax shelter, "the charitable contribution." Donations of money, goods, and services to not-for-profit organizations are fully deductible, an incentive that has allowed the East West Foundation in Boston to redistribute about 800 computers in the last six months. East West was originally concerned with getting computers into the hands of under-equipped journalists and others in the former Soviet Union. But it now ships all over the U.S. and the world. What makes East West unique, according to project coordinator Monica Graves, is that its donations are sponsored by the donor. "In order to maintain our independence we don't choose the recipients; we just take something and fix it, making sure it's complete and up-to-date before passing it on."

Up-to-date at East West includes repairs, technical support, and essential software, elements that usually make the gift of computer equipment a hassle for both donor and recipient. "You're trying to help them," Graves explains. "You don't want to add to their woes by accident, which can happen if you give away used or surplus equipment. We take that burden off the donor's shoulders, giving them the tax benefit and the good PR." For a 386, that benefit would be a deduction of $300 (plus the cost of shipping the equipment to East West, which is also deductible).

The one downside to East West's operations is thatGraves is flooded with requests from organizations in need of equipment. "Unfortunately, we can't give anything out without a sponsor," she says. "We don't have the resources for that.''