Recycling plan for old PCs not rubbish

NET RESULTS:Going by the numbers of PCs I routinely see piled haphazardly into skips, it seems the message about the need to keep computers out of landfills still falls on a lot of deaf or ignorant ears.

Computers contain plastics, glass, steel, gold, lead, mercury, cadmium and fire retardants. Some of these elements are toxic and can leach into the air and ground water when computers are dumped, posing potentially very serious environmental and health hazards - serious enough that the EU has passed directives regarding the ways in which computers can be built and discarded.

That's where WEEE Ireland comes in. WEEE (which stands for waste electrical and electronic equipment) is a not-for-profit organisation, founded by producers of electrical and electronic appliances in order to comply with the legal obligations imposed by the EU.

It works with national recycling body Repak to make sure PCs and any peripherals, cords, chargers, mobiles - or "anything with an electrical plug and a cord", says WEEE's Leo Donovan - goes into the recycling chain.

This was news to me. Like most people, I have a lot of old cords, plugs, chargers and miscellaneous small electronics items around the house. I have a box of electrical doodads in the attic that I either never used, don't use any more, or can't remember what they were used for but once felt they might someday come in useful.

Some of those items have waited a decade of "some days" and their day has not yet come. I've known for ages that I should get rid of that box of thingamajigs, but the rubbish bin didn't seem quite right. I'm delighted to find they can be recycled instead.

That's a familiar story to Donovan, who says many people also have an ancient PC stored in a dusty corner. Don't throw out any of this stuff, he says; it can all be recycled.

To that end - and because this week is the seventh annual Repak Recycling Week - WEEE is planning a number of free collection points for unwanted electronics of any sort tomorrow, October 6th. Collection locations include Castlepollard, Tullamore, Ballyfermot, Rathcoole and Bagenalstown.

More details on this scheme and the regular locations around the country where these items can be brought anytime are on WEEE Ireland's website, www.weeeireland.ie.

Packaging is also a big recycling issue. Most electronics, especially expensive and delicate items such as PCs, come wedged inside lots of moulded polystyrene with cardboard supports, and an external box.

The cardboard has been recyclable for a long time, but not so with polystyrene. That has now changed - the Republic has its first plants for handling the material, says Darrell Crowe of Repak, and people can bring it along to select Repak centres.

There are other options, too. While I was aware that we're all charged a recycling fee when we purchase an electronics item, I didn't know that this means you can bring a like item into the shop and hand it in for recycling when you make that purchase.

Hence if you are buying a new PC and can manage lugging the old one into the shop, the shop is legally obliged to take it from you. But going to an appropriate Repak centre may be a lot easier than marching your old computer through a shopping centre.

Despite those PCs resting in skips, Donovan says we're already beginning to get the hang of recycling our computers. We handed in 315,000 pieces of IT equipment last year, plus 40,000 monitors. Overall, IT and telecommunications equipment comprised 1,523 tonnes, or 7 per cent, of all the electronics material WEEE collected in 2006.

Donovan says that WEEE Ireland has helped see that more than 7kg of household electronics waste per person was collected for recycling in 2006, well ahead of the EU target for the Republic and of 4kg per head of population by 2008.

The Republic is on track to collect 9kg of WEEE per head of population by the end of 2007.

Of course you can also donate working computers and related equipment, too. One place to send your computers and peripherals is Irish organisation Camara, www.camara.ie, which ships used computers reloaded with new operating systems and software to Africa; it has sent out more than 3,000 recycled computers so far. If you have a computer (or many) that you think might fit their bill, check it out.

Blog: www.techno-culture.com