Making Old, New Again

The house we’ve been renting for the past six months has apparently been sold or at least there is now a contract pending on the place. That means once again we must pack our lives back up and move to the next place that will hold us and our possessions for another six months when my current contract expires and the possibility of moving to another place with more stability exists. In the meantime, I’ve been wading through some of the stuff that has collected around here: old vacuum (wasn’t sucking very good so we bought a new one), old DVD player (we won a new one at a company party so we don’t really need another) and an old computer tower, the result of a family member’s upgrade.

While it’s simple to chuck these items into your garbage bin and let the landfill take hold of it, it’s not an environmentally sound idea. Electronic waste or “e-waste” for short, is a growing problem and it’s only getting worse. In fact, some estimates now say that 75% of old electronics are just sitting in storage. We know they shouldn’t go into the landfills and contaminate our groundwater and soils but at the same time we’re not really sure what to do with them.

Luckily there are several ways you can put your old items to a better use and perhaps give someone else the opportunity to have a job or learn a new skill set by repairing and fixing these items. Or there just might be someone else who can use what you don’t want anymore. Freecycle is a great way to get rid of things you have just cluttering up the house. Why spend all the time running a garage sale for a few bucks when you can just give something away? Maybe there’s something you could really use but just don’t have the cash in your budget for it. Take a gander at your local Freecycle and see what’s happening. I use my local group all the time both for giving things away and picking up something I really need.

Here in Arizona, I just stumbled across a website setup by the Arizona Environmental Strategic Alliance and ADEQ. The website, Reuseaz, allows people to post just about anything that could be used again instead of just throwing it away. It doesn’t look like it gets much usage right now, which is a shame. Maybe we can all change that! Also, if you live in Arizona and have an old computer that needs to disappear why not think about donating the unit to the Strut Program. Strut takes the old computers and trains high school students on A+ computer repairs and teaches them skills necessary to enter the workforce. Plus, once the computers are fixed by the students they’re then donated to needy schools and families who don’t have computers. That’s a great way to make something old, new again!

But, before you donate anything with a hard drive on it, you need to think about protecting the data that is stored deep in that hard drive’s recesses.  Remember you may have deleted information or cleared off that hard drive but it’s not enough to protect you.  Pretty much any information on a hard drive is recoverable because it never fully disappears.  Check out Talina’s blog post on “Protecting Your Identity” when it comes to hard drives.  Then, you can donate your computer!

Do you know of a program that relates to these three? Post it here and give us a link so we can all check it out and keep these things out of our landfills.