recycling Re: throw away (was "Re: Datacenter tools?")

Mon Jun 14 11:18:45 PDT 2004

Quoting Alvin Oga (alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com):
> On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Jeff With The Big Yellow Suit wrote:
> > An acquaintance of mine runs a junkyard.   His real money maker
> > is old electronics.  He sells to them in bulk to Chinese firms which
> > extract the precious metals.  As he says, "A little bit of junk is just
> > crap.   A whole lot of junk is money."
> 
> that's a lot of junk they'd have to ship back to get back some $$$
> 	- presumably they just want the fingers of the pci cards
> 	to get the gold out of it
And you'd be presuming that wrong.  Again.

> - for local recycling ...
> 	- monitors is a pain in the butt to recycle ... though
> 	bfi and others seem to take it away and dump at the local 
> 	dump site ( not a good thing )
Actually, CRT's (the tube) are likely the worse part.  But with
transformers containing lots of nasty pollutants, it's a huge
issue.

> 	- ups batteries ... more of a pain to properly get rid of
Nope, not at all.  There is vigourous recycling of lead/acid batteries.
Sealed ones (as common in UPSs) are easy to mail.  I got a return
mailer when I got a new tripplite battery set.

Radio Shack will take all sorts of laptop and rechargable batteries
(NiCd and LiOn).

> 	( these are gonna be creating lots of headaches as soon as
> 	( it starts to find its way to the water supply
> 	( there are millions more throw away batteries now than before
Again, uninformed opinion.  A lot of the particularly nasty stuff
that was in batteries 15 years ago isn't.  Your basic akaline battery
now doesn't contain mercury and a lot of the stuff that was bad for
landfills.

I was fairly concious of these issues working in film as I saved
my used AAA batteries in a bag.  I think I had something on the
order of 200 of them in 6 months (use a minimag 6-7 hrs/day and
add in pager batteries in misc controllers).  NiCd sucked for
pagers (very steep voltage drop meaning it went from fine -> dead
in a few minutes) and one lost job bought another sack of batteries.

> - if exodus, he, other major color create a tech bin, i don't mind
>   going around collecting junk and refurbing to give to "the kids" ??
> 	- it might save a few fish in the bay
But kill a grammar teacher.

"The kids" usually push computers harder than "the parents".  There's
not much Joe Desktop does that pushes the bounds of a machine running
a P/500.  Otoh, "the kids" want to edit video and sound and play games
while IM and EMailing and will actually USE a PCI-X buss.

But datacenter machines are not that.  And I really don't want to give
"the kids" an Ultra 60 or an E420R.

If y'all can find a good use for a DecStation 3100, lemme know.
30MHz of MIPS love there.  It's in my garage.

*IS* it waste?
What's more wasteful?  A 300Watt machine with a 200MHz Ultra Sparc
chip in it or tossing that and replacing it with a 110watt box
with dual 1GHz Pentiums?  (or a 60Watt G4 box?)
Is the waste produced when you dump an 4way E3000 more than what
you save by putting in a machine 6x more powerful that draws 1/3
the power?

At what point does the cost of making electricity outweigh the cost
of handling the waste (well or not).

In Germany, there was a "tax" added to the purchase price of many
things to cover the cost of recycling the packaging.  So if you
plastic-blast a screwdriver to cardstock, it will cost you  more
than if you package it with a plastic form over cardstock with a
staple.  In the latter, to recycle you simply remove the staple
and have easy to handle separate cardboard and plastic.

I though that an interesting notion.

Especially as I stopped a friend from tossing his P/266 for an
entirely new box and got him a new MoBo and RAM.  Same PS (an
Antec which the 'scope shows as really stable under load), same
case, etc.  The P/266 went into an old case I have & was healed
with BSD and runs a mail server for a theater.

*Upgrades* of machines could be encouraged a lot more, IMHO.