I swing by the local recycling center several times each weekend to scavenge through the metals bin. This weekend I found:
A very nice, complete Dynakit Stereo70 tube amp An HP 202D audio oscillator A Leeds and Northrup mirror galvanometer Some sort of a VLF receiver with little motors, gears and linkages.
It must be nice to actually have a recycling center, the New City of Hamilton(pop. 600,000) has a simple and stupid policy, haul EVERYTHING to the landfill and pack it under! Last 'bulk' pickup I lost count of over 500 PCs( tower and monitors) ,just in one subdivision. I know,I know WHY did I count them,well it was kinda funny at first until I thought of the tremendous waste and then the dollars going into the landfill... Ugh, only in Hamilton,Ontario, eh?!!
jay
Yeah but you put milk and juice cartons in the blue box, as do residents of Halton region. Halton region picks up my blue box, but no cartons. OTOH, electronics items (not including CRT's) can be dropped off for re-cycling, same as for your neighbours in Burlington IIRC. Gerry :-)} London, Canada
Stupid.
Our recycling center has a policy of "no computers" People still throw them in the bins and I make a point of pulling them out, stripping them, giving the electronics to my local surplus dealer, putting the metals in the metals bin, throwing away the plastic and and keeping any interesting CPU's, SDRAM and harddrives.
I think the policy on scavenging is "don't ask, don't tell". I've gotten great quantities of threaded rod, fasteners of all kinds, 2 working lawnmowers,
1kva transformers, tek scopes, etc, etc, The only thing that they don't have that would be nice is a book exchange area.
Here in town we have a couple layers of recycling. First is the old town dump, where nowdays they have paper, plastic, cardboard, and metal bins along with a trash compactor and leaf dump. Also at this location is an exhange shed started by volunteers (and hated by the dump employees who are jelous of their turf) about a decade ago. Anything not illegal or oversized can be left here and taken by anyone who wants it.
It would be too long a post to detail the stuff I've found there since I started going, but over the last couple weeks I got a new HP photo printer, a recent HP wide-format inket, a nice toolbox, two iMacs, a camo moving blanket, and a new pressure cooker.
I'd have to say that every community should start something like this. We save the town having to pay for about 18 tons a month.
GTO(John)
Uhh, stupid would be like where I used to work - we HAD to break down all cardboard boxes and make them flat *before* placing them in a separate cardboard dumpster..... then the garbage truck would arrive, pick up the "garbage" dumpster and pack it in, then pick up the cardboard dumpster and pack it in right afterwards..... separate so that it would be mixed..... Ken.
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