Thursday, January 17th, 2019

    Recycling and reusing
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In this country,  we have large  red public containers  for electronic
waste.  People can get rid of their old consumer electronics  for free
just  by throwing it  inside  and  a private Company,  that  owns  the
containers,   makes  profit  from  recycling.   These  containers  are
constructed  in such way,  that when you put something inside,  nobody
can get it out, only people from the Company.  There are double doors,
sliding mechanisms,  etc.  -  in fact several homeless  people already
died while trying  to get in for something valuable enough  to be sold
in pawn shop.

Before  the containers  became  widespread,  each  town  had  its  own
solution  for  electronic  waste  management   and   waste  management
in general.  Of course some of  the smallest towns  and  villages  did
nothing  and people were throwing  their garbage everywhere,  but most
towns had  a place,  opened two or three days a week,  where you could
bring your old electronics (and plastic, metals, paper, ...) and leave
it there to be recycled.  And usually you could also ask the personnel
to let you look in  for something  you could have use for.  That's how
I've got my first  Atari 1040STFM in late 90's  (more precisely board,
power supply,  floppy and keyboard  - the case was already in plastics
container, broken to thousand pieces).

But that's long gone.  Now you see just  red containers everywhere and
if you live in  a town where they still have some kind recycling point
or place,  you'll see that inside  are  again just containers with the
Company logo on them, coupled with CCTV surveillance.

What goes in,  never goes out.  That's a bit of problem and apparently
not just for me.  Even the law says, that the first and most preferred
form of recycling should be reusing.  It's only logical,  even without
some deep knowledge of economic principles - giving something you have
to someone  else  to  use  it  again,  is  more  economical  and  more
environmentally friendly,  than sending it via ship  to the other side
of world to be separated by material and eventually recycled.

So I'm always happy when I see, that someone didn't want to play this
game and hanged his electronics on the container  in a plastic bag or
left it on top/around.  I do the same,  if  I  have  something  still
working or repairable to get rid of.  It's no widespread movement and
probably just tiny portion of people do this, but it's a great way of
fighting seriously bad thing.

And also it's how  I got for free one analog  and  one digital camera
and  an 802.11b  router  for  my  Palm  devices  in just  one  month.
And several cell phones in the last year  and  even  two full desktop
PCs (Pentium 4 era) couple of years ago.  All of them working and all
of them still had/have some life and use ahead,  if not for me,  then
for someone else I know.

The golden rule of ecology is Reduce->Reuse->Recycle, meaning:  Think
twice whether you need something,  before you buy it.  When you don't
need it anymore,  try  to find someone,  who  might  need it.  And if
there's no-one,  then send it for recycling.  I'm all for this.  Just
companies like the mentioned Company probably are against, because it
means less profit for them.

.