The limp cable with the round connector on one end and the square connector on the other had no identifying mark. Mark Dabek squinted at the cable, as if he were an archeologist at an unsuccessful dig. The dark grime on his hands matched the black/brown of his eyes and hair. His denim shirt and jeans were splotched with corrugated cardboard-colored dust. "What the heck is that?" he said to himself. Shrugging, he swept his arm over the piles of cables, circuit boards, keyboards, monitors and unidentified computer objects stacked 20 feet high on steel shelves. "It's just a phantasmagoria of stuff," he declares.

Dabek's assemblage in the "As-Is" department of the Seattle location of RE-PC is far from a dream. It's an environmental nightmare. For more than ten years, his company's 22 employees have disemboweled tens of thousands of Dells, Gateways, Hewlett Packards and Packard Bells and sold their innards to uber-geeks who probably learned the meaning of rejection in high school. But unlike human organs, there's a vast oversupply of computer hearts, lungs, and brains. And if the rejected parts were dumped in a landfill, their decaying bodies would ooze toxic metals into the groundwater, perhaps coming back to haunt us through our taps and shower heads.

Dabek knows this, and he's in a growing movement of people working to curb the impact of waste from computers and other electronics. RE-PC was one of the first Washington State businesses to accept computer parts for recycling, not just for resale. Along with Total Reclaim, another Seattle business, PC Salvage, based in Pierce County, and RE Store, located in Bellingham, RE-PC has taken the lead among state businesses and county governments to dispose of unwanted computer parts responsibly. They hope to make a dent in the massive job of recycling the half-billion computers expected to be obsolete by 2007. The companies' pledge stems in part from a report last year by the environmental group Basel Action Network exposing the common practice of shipping thousands of tons of obsolete computers to Asia, where workers unprotected from toxic chemicals dismantle the machines.

RE-PC has been recycling computer parts since 1994. But King County got interested in high-tech pollution just a few years ago when people started calling Lisa Sepanski and asking her where to throw away their old computers. Sepanski manages the Computer Recovery Project, a program of the King County Solid Waste Division. She says the tech boom of the 90s also led to an explosion of computer waste heading to the dump. Research showed that water seeping through landfills leached out metals from computer parts, so much so that the EPA had to classify the parts as hazardous waste. "Some people never gave a thought to putting their monitor in a dumpster, "she said. "Very soon, it became clear there was a serious problem."

In fact, monitors are the worst offenders. And there's a twist of irony. When manufacturers build monitors, they put lead shielding in the cathode ray tube to prevent radiation from harming the user. But if the monitor winds up in a landfill, that same lead, as much as six pounds worth in each monitor, could seep into the community's water. The lead from solder on circuit boards can also leach out. And the pace of plastic case decay in a landfill is rivaled only by the speed of rush hour traffic on a rainy Friday afternoon.

There's a right way and a wrong way for individuals to do their part to prevent computer pollution. First, find out which businesses in your town accept computer parts for recycling. King County residents can pick up a Computer Recovery Project brochure or visit the Web site, http://dnr.metrokc.gov/swd/default.shtml. If you can't find someone to recycle your old computer, ask your neighborhood computer retailer to visit the BAN Web site, www.ban.org, and take the "Electronics Recyclers Pledge of True Stewardship." Your second action item is to ask your local county government to follow Snohomish County's lead and refuse to accept computers, laptops, monitors, separated computer circuit boards and televisions as garbage. Instead, the county encourages its residents to recycle these items. For more information on local Washington State government activities in this arena, visit the Northwest Product Stewardship Council Web site at www.productstewardship.net.

If you find a business to take computer parts for recycling, Dabek says you should make sure the business sends its collected waste directly to industrial recyclers, rather than to a broker, which sometimes pack their parts into a shipping container and send them to the Far East. Dabek sends his waste to legitimate US and Canadian recyclers, where they recover valuable metals, such as gold and silver.

In the back room at RE-PC, Dabek squeezes between pallets stacked with a hundred or so monitors wrapped neatly in a plastic shroud. When he started in the computer salvage business years ago, "what was coming down the pike nobody wanted to talk about," he says. As computers and electronics become even more pervasive, it's plain that computer recycling will become a more frequent topic of conversation.

The Washington Free Press
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