Washington’s new E-Cycle Program, could do more for local small businesses

The Seattle newspapers have been reporting on an interesting and unfortunate side effect of Washington State’s new “E-Cycle Washington” program.  The program is a new way to deal with the pricey electronic recycling predicament.  Washington’s program is entirely funded by the electronics manufacturers, allowing consumers to drop off many electronic devices (Monitors, TVs, computers, etc) at any of 200 collection sites in Washington state for free.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the program has well-intentioned but unfortunate downside.  According to the Seattle PI article, the state’s rules for “Collectors” prevents the collection sites from dismantling any of the dropped off items.  While this makes sense for some items (opening at CRT could unleash toxic substances), computers themselves have lots of great parts that can be safely removed and ‘recycled’ locally by the collection site.  If someone drops off a computer that works fine or just has a bad hard drive or something, the collection site ought to be able to open up the computer and put in a new hard drive so they can sell the computer to someone else or take out the ram, video card, CD drive, etc and sell those parts to local consumers.

Allowing the collection sites to dismantle computers would be a boon for local computer stores.  Let’s face it, local computer stores are facing an uphill battle these days with dirt cheap computers offered by Amazon, Dell, WalMart, etc.  Allowing consumers to drop off monitors, desktops and laptops for free at local computer retailers for recycle then letting those retailers dismantle and resell components out of those devices would be a great boost for the retailers and it would allow consumers to get really cheap local components to upgrade their computers instead of having to constantly buy new stuff online or from the big box stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.

I hope Washington state listens to the feedback on the program, its not too late to modify the rules slightly to at least allow collection sites to dismantle desktops to recycle and resell the components locally.  The intention is to prevent toxic chemicals from leaking into local soil and water supplies from large-scale initiatives to strip the valuable metals and components out of these devices but we should prevent THAT practice specifically with this legislation through pollution laws and not prevent local businesses from profiting from this great program to allow free recycling for consumers.

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