Paying a company to responsibly recycle a 29 lb box of electronic waste: priceySometimes you take out the technotrash, sometimes it takes you out
Paying the US Postal Service to ship said box to said company: pricier
Finding out that said box was lost in transit: priceless!
The company I refer to is GreenDisk, a WA-based e-waste recycler. As mentioned in a previous post, I'd long been meaning to send them some unwanted electronic materials (aka
"technotrash"), and last month I finally did it. Into a big box I tossed a pile of old videotapes from my mom; some obsolete audio cassettes from my friend Paul; plus my own accumulation of CD-Rs, cords, jacks, a modem, and more. In the end, the box weighed in at 29 lbs, which GreenDisk charged $9.65 to process and the USPS charged $13.30 to ship (via media mail). As I left the Post Office with a smug look on my face, I thought I'd really done my part to close the e-waste loop. In reality, I was about to get Technotrashed.Last Friday, I received a letter from the USPS Des Moines Bulk Mail Center notifying me that an "empty wrapper with [my] address on it was found in the mail and it is believed to have been separated from a parcel during handling". After re-reading the letter a few times (and looking up "parcel" in the dictionary), I realized that by "empty wrapper" they meant my box and by "parcel" they meant my 29 lbs of e-waste.
Five days (and many tears) later, I'm still trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Did the box fall off the mail truck en route to Des Moines, and are its former contents now scattered alongside Interstate 80? Did the postal worker who processed my shipment realize that it contained several episodes of Dr Quinn on VHS, and decide to "sully" his employer's reputation and make off with the whole caboodle?
I might never know. But one thing I do know is that if those 29 lbs of e-waste end up in the landfill—which now seems likely—they will not do so in vain. No, because even if nothing else that's good ever results from this recyclatragedy, at least it gave brumpelstiltskin the inspiration to blog again.
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6 comments:
Bravo to your attempt to keep 29 lbs of waste (although, Dr. Quinn certainly does not fit this description!) out of our landfills. Perhaps, whoever found your parcel was also a GreenDisk supporter and will forward it on to its final destination.
I was recently travelling on I80. I didn't notice any Dr. Quinn VHSs but did notice an inordinate amount of Stone Temple Pilot and Whitney Houston cassette tapes laying in the median. I can only imagine that those were Paul's contributions to ETrash.
Do you think that someone considered these items (not above mentioned cassettes) valuable and stole them? This makes me very hesitant to ever ship anything of importance.
I would imagine the lifetime collection of Hulkamania merchandise was the kicker for the technotrash raiders that feast on these loads
Did you really have to look up the word "parcel"?
PS: this is probably the post most "thematic" to the blog name. Way to go!
Ok, so I must've missed this post when it first came out. That means some jerk out there has my collection of mix tapes from middle school!? I'm pissed.
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