Because it’s a PITA to recycle e-waste, at least where I live in the US. My municipality charges extra to drop off e-waste, and they only have a few days a year where they have dropoff at the local transfer center to get rid of e-waste.
Hope you have the day off and the cash to pay to get rid of whatever it is.
I used to live in a county where it was incredibly easy. Just pull into their clean transfer center and they’ll take it out of your trunk for you. Not just e-waste, but toxic stuff like paint and motor oil. And it was paid for by a very small tax increase.
But now that I live in a different county I have to drop off my electronics between 9 and 3 on a weekday, and there is no mechanism for me to dispose of toxic household waste.
a very small tax increase
That was likely painted as killing your children and causing hellfire to rain down on your home, if some political ads are to be believed. And that’s the actual issue at the heart of everything: if a corporation can’t make obscene amounts of profit doing it, it won’t get done.
If you have Best Buys they have e-waste recycling available year round. It doesn’t really solve the problem though, it just ships it off to poorer countries.
They’ll take. most of the stuff they take, for free: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/services/recycling/pcmcat149900050025.c?id=pcmcat149900050025
Staples also has a good recycling program: https://www.staples.com/stores/recycling
It’s free. I believe, Best Buy packages it all up and ships it to China. I believe Chinese companies pay for the waste, and then pay very poor people to pick through it for valuable (and toxic) metals. A lot of the metals etc. end up in the groundwater. In other words, it’s still mostly pollution, but dropping it off at Best Buy makes it someone else’s pollution…
Not sure how to feel about all of it to be honest. I still recycle at Best Buy, but it’s kinda like recycling plastic in the municipal recycling, I know most of it ends up in the garbage, and thus as pollution, ultimately. But I still put it where it’s ‘supposed’ to go.
