sensitive yet dangerous: grumpfuff: Spice Must Flow: I'm curious if anybody has direct experience recycling ewaste.

I used to volunteer at a thrift store in a small town, which had no recycling facilities of any kind. I'm dimly aware that tweakers sometimes scrap tvs and such, melt them down for a lump of gold and platinum, but the thrift store was not interested in looking into it, partly because of lack of space.

I'm starting a new job this year involving lots of travel to small towns across the state, so I could collect ewaste in my travels and bring it all to an ecycling facility. And eventually build one.

There has to be an economical way to set up a small ecycling facility, and I'm curious if anybody has any firsthand experience with ecycling.

I can't speak to the town in the article, but ewaste recycling is fairly common where I live in northern NJ(60-90 minutes north). They gather it up in a couple different ways (some towns do a once a month collection, some do a once a week, and some have a drop-off open at various times during the week). My town picks it up once a month or you can drop it off on any Saturday. Friend of mine lives near Mt. Laurel, the town won't pick it up but you can drop it off at a town collection center that's open ~40 hours a week.

They then turn around and sell it off to nearby facilities that can process, etc them. From what I've seen, basically put, the towns gather it up for free from residents, then sell it for a small profit to industry. Industry then reclaims whatever and either use it themselves or sell it off to another party. A couple areas have their own processing plant though, so things are changing.

What's feasible greatly depends on where you live and attitudes in the area. Just as a simple example, I doubt anyone would want to set up in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, but you could feasibly make a small amount gathering it up and shipping it elsewhere.

I thought it may be fun to set up a sort of electronics-themed coffee shop that has an ewaste recycling point. Customers come by, we rate the value of their ewaste and give them a coffee voucher if it has value. The good examples are saved for an upcycling (some people throw out good stuff that a lesser privileged person could still use) or used in the shop as an exhibit or decoration while the rest are responsibly recycled.