recycling tv's etc.

[...]

I have a killer 3-head 3-motor SONY open-reel tape deck that I'm going to put on Craig's List (along with a ton of free tapes). A real classic. If you're anywhere near Santa Monica CA, maybe you're interested? For money, not love.

Aspasia

The same with some thrift stores. I make regular pickups from three local stores, every other week.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

You can thank the lawyers for that. Someone drags something home, gets hurt, then sues the owner of the dump.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Homer J Simpson spake thus:

Did you get all that from Freecycle?

--
  "In 1964 Barry Goldwater declared: 'Elect me president, and I
  will bomb the cities of Vietnam, defoliate the jungles, herd the
  population into concentration camps and turn the country into a
  wasteland.' But Lyndon Johnson said: 'No! No! No! Don't you dare do
  that. Let ME do it.'"

- Characterization (paraphrased) of the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson
presidential race by Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost
Authority."

Neither have I, but I am 59 and I've reached my limit. I have twelve

12" tv's, half color and have black and white, that I have tried or will try to fix, and about twelve 19" tvs, all color, that I haven't tried to fix yet but will give them maybe an hour each. But now I have 3 more than I can use 19 inch that work, all from the trash. In the last couple years, most that I have found still work.

And last week I found a 24 or 25 inch model. So far it only gets 2, 4 (DC), 11, 13, and 24, but that's using the autofinder. I have to set a remote to try other stations we have, and if it gets them all, or even channel 3, I'll use all my strength and get it down to the basement. It must be fairly old, or maybe it is because of the picture tube, because it is heavier than other recent 19inch tv's, and bulky, and I have ready dropped the thing once, breaking the plastic things the back is screwed to. But I can glue that together well enough.

But I'm not taking it downstairs until I know it works, so it has been on the front sidewalk covered by a blue mesh tarp for the last 8 days.

Anyhow, what is the point of fixing tv's that I don't need and will be almost obsolete in 2? years. (Almost because I'm not buying 7 new tv's and there won't be any on the sidewalk for a few years, so I'm going to buy one adapter and use one central place for tuning all the tv's.

And I can't strip them because I'm out of room for storing such parts. So 24 tv's or more are going to go out pretty much in one piece during the next 4 months. Plus I have a small xerox machine that according to the paperwork I found with it, the previous owner didn't want to pay to have it fixed, and I don't think I can. And a big but light laser printer that needs a new heater, that I got for free or under 5 dollars, and it wasn't worth fixing.

But they won't. This is why I'm pretty sure the trash man will still take tv's, because for a lot of people, it will be an incredible chore to go to this one place in central baltimore county, 20 or 30 miles from where some people live.

I do that too. So far the fastest I've gotten was 200 MHz, but it was a Dell also and I wanted one for a particular reason.

I just want to get a 1" x 1 1/2" x 1/4" plastic piece that says Kenmore on it, from a refrigerator at the waste disposal place, but I haven't found one yet. I knocked the piece off and it should be on the floor in my kitchen somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. If I order the part, it will probably be 325 dollars.

Remove NOPSAM to email me..

I agree with you.

I once told the story of drivign down 2nd Avenue in NYC, somewhere in the 20's and seeing a big (though only 5 or 6 foot high dumpster full of books.

There were about 6 guys inside gathering books, plus I joined them of course. All hardback, on every subject. There were 3 kinds of people, those who would get in for a while, those who would just walk by, and those who would stand outside once in a while pointing to a book and asking someone to get it for them. How they could see the title on a hardback book with no dust cover, I don't know.

I got about 20 or 25 books the first day, and I went back 2 out of the next 4 days. The level of books kept getting lower. There must have been 20,000 to start, and maybe 10,000 when I stopped going. But they were probably adding more books every day also. (I had to come from Brooklyn.) The weather was beautiful every day. New Yorkers are used to finding good stuff in the trash, because most aparatments are small and even in the 70's people couldnt even keep a broken 12 inch tv waiting for a time to fix it. No room.

I got about 35 books in total.

Remove NOPSAM to email me..

Yes. I only need the TV's to last a year. A lot of people are junking them for plasma etc.

I suspect that this is a regulation, not a law. And it's probably because the people running the dump are absolutely convinced that some s*****ad is going to haul a gas-powered appliance out of the dump, cut their finger, have the appliance blow up, (explaining why it was in the dump in the first place) and then sue them.

What you need to do is set up a non-profit junkyard.

In my neighborhood, we have "heavy trash" pickup once a month. I call it "foraging night." In addition to a shop-vac, a recliner, and other goodies, my prize is a WW2 jerry can. It's a military five-gallon gas can and is in perfect shape. What makes this one so neat is the stencil on the bottom:

09-44 IIIArmy

You can Google for the exploits of the US 3rd Army in September 1944. This very gas can may have helped liberate the 101st Airborne at Bastonge in December 1944. Who knows?

Not very likely. Most of the low cost types of equipment was left behind because it cost more to bring it back, than the cost to replace it. It was probably being readied to be shipped overseas and never made it. Millions of dollars worth of military gear was sold for pennies on the dollar at the end of WW II, because they no longer needed it, and the cost to build warehouses for long term storage would have cost more than it was worth.

--
My sig file can beat up your sig file!

HeyBub spake thus:

Well, I was asking about freecycle.org. But since you mentioned it, FreeStuffAtTheCurb.yourtown.org is actually, to me, a better method of exchange than freecycle. At least there's always plenty of stuff to choose from, and no stupid "moderators" to deal with.

--
Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when
you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm)

Goedjn spake thus:

Like Urban Ore, in Berkeley, CA, which, while not exactly a "junkyard", is a store with items that would otherwise be in the dump. There are many places like it sprouting up all over the country, and, I'm sure, the world. I've gotten all kinds of good stuff there.

Interestingly, UO started as an operation *at the dump* way back in the good old days, where people would retrieve potentially useful items before they were bulldozed under, lay them on tables, and you could go and take them for free. I heard that this system lasted a couple of years before it was shut down by the "sanitary landfill" authorities.

--
Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when
you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm)

You are correct that it is all relative, but unfortunately, the responses are not relative pro rata, which was my point. No one would disagree that if you get lead into your body in sufficient quantity, it's not gonna do you a lot of good. The point is that it is actually quite difficult to get lead into your body in sufficient quantity to do damage. Lead in gasoline was a good way. Lead in solder or CRT glass faceplates, is not. Tin / lead solder is a stable substance. No matter how much you run water over solder, the lead ain't gonna leach out of it in sufficient concentration to be a problem. Even if you factor in acid rain - and there's a lot less of that now that there are laws against noxious airborne waste discharges of nasty stuff like sulphur dioxide - you still have a hard job washing lead out of solder into the water table.

Europe is renowned for having committes and workgroups and think-tanks who come up with hysterical reactions to non-problems. Lead in solder is a good example. Don't get me wrong. I am not against recycling per se, but for the right reasons. Whilst on the surface, any actions that genuinely contribute to " saving the planet " are laudable, and indeed desirable, you also have to look at the other side of the coin which is often forgotten, and that is the energy budget to carry out the recycling.

By the time you have collected your goods, sorted them in a heated and well-lit worker-friendly warehouse that you had to custom build, dismantled them, recovered any reusable materials, repurified them, remanufactured them, and finally disposed of whatever is left, you may well have used more energy, and contributed more to pollution, than if you had not bothered. Just looking at lead free solder. I wonder how much additional energy is now being used worldwide, to heat all of those solder baths up another 40 degrees, heat up all those rework stations another 40 degrees, heat up all those millions of hand soldering irons another 40 degrees ? How much additional transport energy to get goods suffering from lead-free bad joints back to a repair centre, and then back to the customer ? Quite a lot I would wager, and certainly more than a few wind turbines can make up ...

Arfa

Thanks, but I already have three Teacs. I paid $1 for the first one, at a church rummage sale, in 1992. No one could make it work. It was missing the shorting plug in the back where the hardwired remote control plugged in. I added a lead shorting the two appropriate pins, and it worked flawlessly.

The next Teac was left out for the trash. I saw it on one of my after-dinner walks. I picked it up, intending to carry it a mile back home. I had to stop a few times on the way to catch my breath. Do you know that a 7" three-motor Teac weighs 55 pounds?

I already have one. I call it "home."

I'm a member of that group too. I used to put a lot of stuff on Freecycle, but I found it much easier just to put things out at the end of the sidewalk with a sign on it, "FREE - GRATIS." That way, people who don't own computers have a crack at having my old stuff. It disappears in broad daylight; it disappears after dark. All I care about is that it disappears.

[...]

AMAZED at what I find on the curbs when I visit family in NYC! Always want to take stuff home to CA, but not much room in the overhead bins for filing cabinets, etc.

because most apartments are small

And you probably READ them! More power to you.

Just to mention: If one wanted to take the time & trouble, one could collect and donate to "minority/disadvantaged" public (and perhaps parochial?) schools that have tiny budgets than the Beverly Hills-type public schools with their higher property tax base.

I've done that; called schools and arranged to take them boxes of books and magazines. Eager, alert kids* can mine these donations for information that is not in their canned textbooks. And overworked/underpaid teachers can use these materials for lesson plans, clip art, etc.

• Yes, there ARE some!

Closing anecdote: Years ago I was on (camera) safari in Kenya. We'd stop at these villages - basically wide places in the road -- and visit the schools. Pathetic facilities; almost no basic supplies & teaching materials. I just boil, all these years later, thinking of how materials -- from paper to computers to AV equipment -- are disrespected and WASTED!

Grrr...people should see how the other 1/2 -- or rather 7/8 -- lives.

Aspasia

[...] [...]

Tell that to the Romans, whose much-lauded plumbing systems-- a marvel of the ancient world -- were made with lead pipes, which many historians have indicted as one of the reasons for the Decline and Fall (crazy emperors, etc.)

Aspasia

But you see this is just the sort of unsubstantiated hearsay that perpetuates these myths, and gets the eco-crazies going in the first place. " Which many historians have indicted etc ". These people are just that - historians with an idea, not scientists with facts. All of the water in the UK was distributed by lead pipes up until a few years ago. In some rural areas, and certainly within many houses, it still is. My generation, and certainly up to mine, weren't crazy. Judging by what I see of kids now, including my own, we had a far higher level of inherent intelligence. The current craziness of the society here, could be said to have commenced with the introduction of plastic water pipes, so perhaps we should jump right on the bandwagon here, and start making all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about brain-destroying substances from oily plastics such as polythene, getting into the water supply. And just maybe, I've got something there, with all the current stuff about short term memory loss that everyone claims to be suffering from - even to the point where Nintendo or whoever it is, have brought out a memory exercising game for busy execs on the move ... !!

As far as lead in the water from lead pipes goes, again, in general, this is nonsense. I sincerely hope that for the most part, the water treatment company supply me with water that is largely pure and neutral. This will not cause the lead to break down and wash out in any quantity that is a problem. If there is anything else in the water in substantial quantity, it is likely to be some flouride compound, added by the water company, and thus representing *definite* proven, and government-sponsored pollution of the water supply with a harmful substance ( no one is really sure what the real long-term effects of poisoning people in this way are ), or calcium compounds which were in the water in the first place. As we all know, these rapidly precipitate out of the water, and coat the insides of the pipes as limescale, be them copper or lead. Once this has occured, there can no longer be even any perceived threat, let alone a real one, from the lead that the pipe is fundamentally made from.

Arfa