Correction at 9:20 a.m. PDT: The time span for Office Depot's figures is one year.
Last year, Office Depot recycled almost 1.5 million pounds of old tech equipment through its service for consumers, the company said Wednesday.
That sounds like a lot. It makes you realize how quickly all those landfills must be filling up since that figure represents only the junk from people who 1) actually bother to recycle, and 2) chose to go with Office Depot's recycling program.
For a comparison, I decided to check how other company-sponsored recycling programs are doing. Unfortunately, as sustainability expert Kevin Wilhelm told CNET, there is yet to be a standard way for companies to calculate such statistics. What's included in recycling statistics varies from company to company, but the data I dug up offers a rough idea of what's going on in this arena.
Staples, an Office Depot competitor, began offering an in-store recycling service in May 2007. It charges $10 per large item regardless of where you originally bought it; recycles small items like keyboards, mice, and speakers for free; and offers $3 in Staples rewards for Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark or Dell brand printer cartridges.
By the end of the 2007, Staples had recycled 2 million pounds of tech junk, including almost 24 million printer cartridges in the U.S., according to the company's 2007 sustainability report.
What about the computer manufacturers themselves?
Hewlett-Packard has had a recycling program since 1987 and in January 2009 launched a new program that offers money for old tech equipment. As of June 2007, the company had recycled more than 1 billion pounds of electronics and printer cartridges and expanded to include consumer programs in 50 countries. HP's new goal is to reach 2 billion pounds by the end of 2010.
Unlike Office Depot, which asks customers for pay $5, $10, or $15 for a box they can fill with everything from printers to digital cameras, HP offers credit that can be put toward the purchase of an HP product.
Apple has consumer recycling programs in 95 percent of the countries where it sells its computers. In 2007, it collected about "21 million pounds of e-waste," according to the company's 2008 environmental report.
Dell offers consumer recycling programs worldwide. In the U.S., it's free. Between 2006 and 2008, Dell recycled about 255 million pounds of its own products. Its goal is to recover about 275 million pounds by the end of 2009, according to its 2008 Global Corporate Responsibility Report.
Big Blue seems to have recycled the most, or at least calculated the most.
Between 1995 (when it began keeping track) and the end of 2007, IBM "collected and recovered (resold, refurbished, or recycled)" more than 1.5 billion pounds of product and product waste worldwide, according to the company's latest corporate sustainability report.
In the U.S., IBM offers consumer recycling programs on a state-by-state basis.
While recycling tech equipment is definitely a positive way to do your part for the environment, it's also important to keep your computer information secure. Always remember to properly wipe computers clean of your personal information before giving away or recycling them. Coincidentally, CNET's Seth Rosenblatt did a piece on wiping hard drives clean earlier this week.
Hewlett-Packard has decided to offer people in the United States money in exchange for their old tech equipment, the company announced Tuesday.
The PC maker has had a recycling program for years that lets consumers determine the value of their old tech equipment, then receive a credit for that value toward a new HP or Compaq brand product.
This new recycling program does not require people to buy anything to realize a monetary gain from giving HP their old tech equipment, though they are responsible for postage when mailing in the item. The shipping costs associated with a "Premium Service," in which FedEx picks up the old electronics, are taken out of HP's check to the consumer.
Some green-spring news during this gray winter: an old Dell Inspiron will garner a check of about $60 through HP's expanded recycling program.
(Credit: Candace Lombardi)HP calls its new program the HP Consumer Buyback and Planet Partners Recycling Program. The program offers money in exchange for any brand of PC, monitor, printer, digital camera, or smartphone that HP determines still has some sort of value. It's part of HP's effort to recycle 2 billion pounds of electronic junk by 2010. As of now, the company has recycled more than 1 billion pounds of e-waste.
It's like Antiques Roadshow for techies, only you don't have to go to the fair to find out what your attic junk is worth.
HP has a quote Web site for the buyback program that lets consumers input the specs of their old tech equipment and receive a free instant quote.
In testing out the system, I discovered that HP offers examples from a drop-down menu, but will also accept items that have been modified, and it offers a place to put in the modified configuration and evaluate it. For example, I found that an old Dell Inspiron notebook with a 20GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, a Pentium III M 1.0GHz processor, and loaded with Windows XP Professional is worth about $60.
If your tech junk is determined by the online tool to have no value, you're out of luck for financial gain, but if it's an HP or Compaq brand product, you can still opt to mail it to HP for recycling.
I took it one step further and tested out the value of the same old Dell laptop against HP's U.S. trade-in recycling program, which is another option for consumers. On trade-in, the same old Dell Inspiron gets me an $86 credit.
Given this economy, I'd say it's worth your time to look up the value of your electronic junk on HP's site and make that trip to the post office.
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