Clearing a Path From Desktop to the Recycler

NORTH HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. - It was as if a floodgate of memory, electronic memory, suddenly burst open.

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From out of closets, and from deep corners of basements, emerged the digital equivalent of a thousand Proust-like madeleine moments: old Commodore Plus/4's with cracker crumbs in the keys, original I.B.M.'s with floppy disks but no hard drives, perfectly good but long dormant things called word processors.

Even some Pong games have come mixed in among the 455 monitors, 300 central processing units, 205 printers and 55 laptops that have spilled into the town dump since the cutting-edge recycling program for electronics began in April.

"This stuff has been in the basement for about eight years," Brad Hantverk, a Roslyn Heights dentist, said as he hauled from his trunk two monitors, a C.P.U., three VCRs, a scanner, two keyboards and a printer. "I've been waiting and waiting."

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that people threw away 2.5 million tons of electronic equipment, known as e-waste, last year, about 10 percent of which was recycled. While federal law regulates the disposal of electronics by businesses and government agencies, it does not affect individual consumers, who account for more than half the e-waste produced annually, according to the federal agency.

Every old computer monitor contains about four pounds of lead, and other parts are filled with heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, cadmium and chromium. They have toxins that hover in the air after incineration or leach into the water supply when buried in landfills. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh say that dumps around the nation's major cities, including New York, hold more than 60 million computers.

Now, a consensus is emerging among environmentalists and public officials that protections need to be put in place against a dam-bursting amount of obsolete computer equipment and dormant televisions sitting in American closets and basements that could soon hit the waste stream. Six states have passed laws, most in the last two years, requiring people to recycle electronic trash; the New York State Legislature is expected to consider such a bill next year, having passed a narrower measure mandating recycling of cellphones that takes effect in January.

But the bulk of the effort has been left to scattershot, voluntary, local programs like the one here in Nassau County. On four Sundays over the past six months, at a cost of ,000, North Hempstead town workers have been stationed at the dump, helping residents load their electronic detritus into cardboard boxes, which were later shipped to a recycling company in Buffalo.

"People had been holding onto these things, like they were intuitively aware that this kind of stuff should not go into the landfill," said Michael Engelmann, the town commissioner of waste management. "In the last few years, the need for this has become explosive."

Besides environmental concerns or instinctive hoarding, many consumers retain computers long after their life cycles out of fear that personal information on their hard drives could be stolen. In fact, such data can easily be erased by computer experts before tossing equipment into the trash. It is destroyed during the recycling process, anyway.

The new recycling surge comes amid a flood not only of old equipment but also of newer-model computers, televisions, laptops, cellphones, BlackBerries, iPods and everything else electronic that becomes last year's model almost the moment it is born.

"The rate at which tech-savvy consumers are buying new electronics - the thinner laptop, the next generation iPod, the newest of the new everything - is fairly unprecedented," said Alex Fidis, a staff lawyer for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which is pushing for environmental protection against e-waste.

Matthew Hale, director of the Environmental Protection Agency's office of solid waste, said the federal government was increasingly concerned about a coming tidal wave of electronic trash. "People have been buying electronics for a long time, and they tend to keep electronics for a long time," he said in a telephone interview. "But it's a maturing industry, and we're beginning to see significant waste streams coming from it."

Recycling a computer usually means taking the valuable metals out of it and selling them. Michael Lodick, president of Electronics Recycling Technologies, in Buffalo, which handles e-waste for a number of public and private customers including North Hempstead, said some computers were refurbished and sold to schools. But most end up disassembled, sorted, crushed and melted down to their elemental parts.