Recycling electronics

I've been collecting broken electronic equipment for a few years. I've kept our last several cell phones and batteries. They are small and didn't take much room. Within the last year we had two dvd players die. Those were bigger than the cell phones but still pretty easy to store. Last year our computer died. Now things were starting to really pile up. I knew I didn't want to throw them in the trash because that meant they were going to a landfill. I knew they could (& should) be recycled but didn't really know where to take them.

They have been sitting in a plastic bin downstairs. I guess I was waiting for them to walk themselves to a recycling center. That never happened. I was tired of seeing them every time I went downstairs. I was tired of moving them to vacuum under them. I was tired of taking out toys that accidentally got dropped in them. I knew Best Buy would take most used electronics and recycle them for free. I found out they would take a CPU but it would cost $25 unless the hard drive was gone. I didn't want to pay $25 if I could avoid it. I knew I could probably take out the hard drive. Last week I looked online and realized the hard drive from our CPU was already gone. That's all I needed. I was going out without the kids and decided that was it, they were going.

I took
1 cell phone
5 cell phone batteries
2 dvd players
1 portable dvd player
1 CPU
1 computer cord
2 cell phone charging cords
1 scanner

They took everything. For free.

Again, relief. (Like when I recycled all those magazine pages.)

It didn't really take that much time to do. It was just deciding that I had had enough. It felt good to get it all out of my house. It felt good to know that none of it was going in the trash. It was one of those things about which I now think, "What took me so long?"

That won't happen again.