From Uptownmaker on the TC Maker Blog: Some questions have come up as to what we're going to do with excess junk that we're not going to salvage. I'd think that one of us can bring the stuff to a city recycling center, maybe the one in Bloomington. Possibly also they have a recycling bin at Leonardo's; I'm not sure.

Anyone want to volunteer for recycling?

I'm going to bring some hard drives and an old Sony game station to disassemble, and possibly some other things.

Stuff that comes from my company will have to go back to my company- there could be uncomfortable questions asked if too many circuit boards with my company's name on them end up in a municipal recycling center.

Otherwise, I'd say we should do our best to separate- plastics in one pile for trash, metals in another for recycling, and electronics in a third for the hazardous waste disposal path.

Someone dropped off a microwave by our dumpster a couple days ago. I'd like to gut it, but I don't know that I want to be responsible for disposing of the corpse afterwards.

Bring it.

With electronics, 95% of the volume can be trashed. It's that pesky 5% that needs to be sent to the hazardous waste recycling. I'll figure out something to do with that 5%.

Can do. There's also an old TV there, but I don't think I want to be messing around with some big capacitors, still probably capacitating. Plus there's the CRT.

Yeah, probably there isn't enough time in one evening to deal with the TV and other things. I'm sure some in our group know proper ways to deal with TVs safely, i.e., grounding yourself and wearing rubber gloves, discharging caps, etc. I'd say grab the TV anyway, if you have space to store it, and we'll perform the surgery some other time.

CRT devices are, on the whole, not worth the hassle. They have some very high voltages inside, and usually don't have terribly useful stuff otherwise.

The flyback transformer for stepping the voltage up to the kV range can be a nice acquisition, however...

I found an old Vodavi phone system waaaay up on the top shelf at work. No phones, just the key system. It's maybe mid-80s vintage, so lots of discrete componenty bits.

I have a flatbed scanner, a Lexmark inkjet, about 40 office phones (with 2x20 LCDs), a pretty big swath of PCBs from my company's trash (including a handful of 300V DC power supplies), and some static safe bags and plastic boxes for everyone to take their finds home in.