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E-waste extinction event looming

R

RickNel

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 24, 2009
Messages
641
Location
Canberra, Australia
In Australia, the trickle of vintage treasures turning up at landfills is about to be choked off. Up to now, municipalities have been charging a hefty recycling fee to anyone wanting to dump electronic gear. That results in a deal of moonlight roadside dumping (from which I have picked up a few gems), but many good people have sought out recycling centres that would take gear for re-sale. Some vintage stuff gets through the sorters there who don't know it is useless for normal buyers. Other people have hoarded their obsolete gear, waiting for the day they could dump it for free.

Now that digital TV has reached full national penetration, the government is reclaiming the analog TV spectrum. Transmitters will be switched off and analog TVs will be dumped in their millions over a short period. The government, as a sweetener to the broadcast and appliance industries, from this June is underwriting a massive free recycling program for electronics, or "E-waste" as they call it.

In this avalanche of the obsolete, countless thousands of retired computers from the dawn of iTime will be dragged from sheds and storerooms and go straight to the grinders and furnaces, with no chance for collectors to sort treasure from trash.

I expect CRTs and all boxes older than P4 to become rare very quickly. This gives me another excuse to hang on to stuff I probably should have dumped years ago. Among it, a crappy little 10w UHF transmitter, so I can still drive my small collection of analog TVs, 4" to 40".

The life cycle of serviceable ~> junk ~> collectible ~> rare is about to get a generational push forward. There'll be less to collect around here.

Rick
 
Despite polices like this being in place in the US for years, there is still plenty of old stuff laying around. The switch to digital didn't result in CRTs vanishing either. There are still plenty of console style TVs out there in use with converter boxes. It seems that scavengers around here have been getting picky. I left that Celeron circa 2001 Sony Vaio tower on the curb here for 3 days before someone took it. Nobody bothered to take some other working stuff I have left on the curb which got send to the scrapper. E-waste recycling has been free here for well over a decade.
 
I think older Macs have suffered a lot more than older PCs. The 680x0 to PowerPC and Classic to OS X transitions made everything older than the iMac so rapidly obsolete that they are virtually all gone by now, whereas I still see a lot of 386 through Pentium III era PCs around -- some even still in use.
 
While CRT's are still around (how many millions were made every year) all the vintage ones are long gone (12-14"). There are still tons of crappy DELL and Gateway branded monitors around from the late 1990's.

286,386,486 machines are not that easy to find anymore (unless you hit up another collector) and the Pentium to P4 era stuff is mostly ground up by now. Pentium pro chips will be very rare soon.

With the economy in the crapper there are tons of people making coin from recycling grade A e-waste (motherboards) for $3 a pound, the older the model the more it is worth by weight.
 
Actually pentium pro chips I've seen as somewhat rare already. They're extremely uncommon locally and online tend to have a bit of a price tag with them over the last few years. Took me a few years in general to get one for the board I had and even then most of my luck was finding systems that were tossed that folks didn't realize were ppro. Of course performance wise the Pentium MMX was faster so I can see the logic.

Same fate with the smaller CRTs. Once they became highly less useful a lot of folks discarded them and kept the 17s that their newer systems had. Heck now I have a few LCD monitors I don't even need laying around. The only folks that think they're worth anything are the thrift stores pretending to sell them.
 
Out here both the local recycler and Goodwill are competing for e-waste. It's been a long time since I've seen much vintage gear being offered locally.
 
I met a few local "scrappers" from those e-waste places, I gave them a list of things I will pay more then what they receive for the scraps. Since its a local and not some big corporation who doesn't care about us as a person it works well. IBM 5150 works! and so do the laptops i got from him. He had a hoarding pile of games which would have brought a tear to my eye, but i didn't have the cash at the time. Still talk to him time to time too. if he runs into any Pentium I or II based laptops he gives me a shout, I love dealing with those things, I never find a good AMD K6 Desktops ( running low on space however so i guess its a good thing)
-endrant
We shall do what we can to keep what we have!
 
barythrin said:
Same fate with the smaller CRTs. Once they became highly less useful a lot of folks discarded them and kept the 17s that their newer systems had.
Click to expand...

15-inch and smaller CRTs were being thrown out even before LCDs became common, because most can't do 1024x768 resolution at anything higher than 60 Hz refresh rate, which is annoyingly flickery with all the bright white backgrounds Windows loves to use.

Also at that resolution the text is rather small, so once 17-inch CRTs became cheap enough, the decision to upgrade was a no-brainer. Even way back around 2003 or so, I remember picking a 15-inch Acer CRT monitor off the curb that had a "FREE" sign on it. I still have it today, and it has an incredibly bright and sharp display -- obviously it had very little use, compared to the office-surplus 17" Dell Trinitron monitors I picked up which all were dim, fuzzy, and out of convergence.
 
I guess a couple of observations:-

In the UK where we have had digital TV for ages the first generation of digital boxes are now scrap as well. I took two to the "re-cycling center" (all items free to non-trade, so if you are trade pop it in the car boot) a coupkle of weeks ago, where there was cage full of old TVs, but this is driven more by the desire to have a flat panel. Converters are still widley available for around £20 and I have to use one on my first generation CRT wide screen "digital" TV. Now I guess that is a rarity, even the spammers have abndonded the Yahoo group for those... but I bet its got no value at all...

Dave
 
Here in San Diego there is so much vintage apple stuff and crt tvs, but no 486 or 386 computers! Eventually I got so frustrated that i just got one off ebay. Anyone know when the 486 computers started disappearing? Also here it is very hard to find a monitor that dates before the early 2000s or smaller than 17"
 
Nice to see a fellow San Diegan on the boards. Apple IIs and Macs are basically a dime a dozen out here, I agree. I imagine California is like that in general since we're so close to Silicon Valley and all. I don't personally collect PC stuff, but I agree, the older stuff is rather scarce. Old 80s CRTs pop up every now and then in the craigslist free section
 
There is a huge premium for 486 chips for scrappers (gold content) so they are getting picked up to be melted not for collecting.
 
TanruNomad said:
Old 80s CRTs pop up every now and then
Click to expand...

I live in a city of 300,000 that is a full day trip from anywhere else - so travelling to pick up a heavy CRT or other item is hard to justify.

I have a couple of working CRT terminals, but I'm also hoarding some 12-15" CRT TVs against the day when the only workable CRT display might be a composite output to a TV. Weight is the greatest cost in collecting these things.

Rick
 
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