Earth Day electronics recycling

My company is holding a recycling event on Friday (Earth Day) at our HQ. It’s being run by Guardian Data Destruction, which is apparently a company we partner with in some way.

I have quite a lot of electronics that I need to get rid of. Somerset County does have an electronics recycling program, but I never manage to get around to bringing my stuff in on one of the designated Saturday drop-offs. I also haven’t been as good at selling or giving away old electronics as I used to be.

So I’ve got a lot of stuff piled up. I’ve got an old TiVo, Nintendo Wii, DVD player, HD-DVD player, MacBook, Dell Inspiron, iPod, an old UPS battery, a few random hard drives, and various accessories. I’m not sure if they’ll take the UPS battery, but I’m pretty sure they’ll take everything else.

They say that they’ll be shredding all hard drives, but just in case, I’m running DBAN on my old Dell Inspiron. I could probably run DBAN on the MacBook hard drive too, but I had already done a full OS X reinstall when I retired that MacBook, so I don’t think there’s much trace of my old data on it.

I feel kind of bad about scrapping computers that are still, technically, working. In the past, I’ve always managed to sell or give away my old computers. But the MacBook and Dell were both purchased in 2007, so they’re nearly ten years old. And, in a world where you can buy a new ChromeBook for $150, nobody is going to want a ten-year-old MacBook or Inspiron.

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