05 April, 2007

I received a comment on my article about freecycling from Polishifter. He said he participates in recycling computer components. That got me thinking: I had patronized a store in KC that had such a program but hadn't yet looked into what's available in Clearwater. So, I looked.

I found two.
One, Cartridge World at http://www.cartridgeworldtampa.com/ specializes in cartridge refilling and included this info on its website:

• It takes about a gallon of oil to make a new laser cartridge.
• Almost 8 cartridges are thrown away per second in the United States alone!
• In North America alone, over 350 million cartridges per year are discarded in our landfills, and that number increases by 12 percent annually!'

The other breaks down computers and their components for the salvageable parts and sells them for reuse. With the ever-accelerating pace of technology, we can't afford to just junk our IT. A sensible alternative is this recycling.