I was one of many Canberrans who turned up for the Dell PC recycling at the ANU today. I took an old Pentium 233 desktop (the oldest and slowest of the 4 PCs in my house – even Linux runs slow on this one), a dead external SCSI drive carrier, and my ancient laser printer (over 10 years old and about 20Kgs) out to the ANU in the back of my Scoobydoo.
I arrived just before 11:00 and was pleasantly suprised by the logistics and organisation of the event. There was a slight traffic jam (Canberra sized) along the road out the front as people queued to get in from both directions. While in the queue I was asked to complete a small survey about PC recycling, and then moved through to the drop off area, where the people (all wearing Dell shirts BTW) unloaded the hardware from the boot of my car. The old hardware was being stacked onto pallets, wrapped with pallet wrap, and then loaded onto a large semi trailer with a forklift. As I drove out there were already 4 large pallets of gear wrapped on the truck, and many more partially loaded pallets. I then cruised home leaving behind a cloud of smug (thanks Southpark) knowing that my old hardware had not gone into landfill and resulted in the death of a thousand baby seals.