What to Do With Old Computers and Electrical Appliances?

What do you do with appliances such as fridges, microwave ovens, televisionsd, phones and computers that are well past their use by date and no longer work? For most of us, we wait until our local councils hold a household rubbish collection (different from our weekly rubbish collection). Most councils hold these at least once a year and many people “hang out” for these and walk the streets looking to make someone’s trash, their treasure!

Waiting for the council collection usually means those old items are cluttering up our garages or backyards waiting for that annual date and hopefully we don’t forget to place them on our footpaths the night before collection.

These old appliances have typically been buried as landfill, leaving toxins that leach into the ground and our waterways.

Each year 1.5 million televisions are disposed of and this is increasing rapidly because by the end of 2013 the government is switching off the analogue signal all over Australia. Most of us are upgrading our analogue televisions to digital.

If 75% of those 1.5 million televisions that are discarded annually were recycled, it would amount to a national saving of approximately 23,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents, 520 mega litres of water, 400,000 gigajoules of energy and 160,000 cubic metres of landfill space.

Finally we have a service available to us to correctly dispose of our old electrical equipment and help us achieve a sustainable future.   As a general rule of thumb, they believe that anything that “plugs in” can be recycled and state that between 95%-98% (by weight) will be fully recycled.

1800Ewaste comes to you, takes away your old appliances and delivers it to the appropriate recycling facility.

http://www.ewaste.com.au/