Excerpt from 3/4/07 Santa Barbara news Press Article by Terence Chea - Associated Press Roseville

– This is where computers go to die a green death. Inside Hewlett-Packard Company’s cavernous recycling plant in the Sacramento suburbs, truckloads of obsolete PCs, servers and printers collected from consumers and business nationwide are cracked open by goggled workers who pull out batteries, circuit boards and other potentially hazardous components. The electronic carcasses are fed into a massive machine that noisily shreds them into tiny pieces and mechanically sorts the fragments into piles of steel, aluminum, plastic and precious metals. Those scraps are sent to smelting plants, mostly in the Sacramento area, where they are melted down for reuse. The computer industry is ramping up its campaign against electronic waste, a dangerous byproduct of technology’s relentless expansion. HP and Dell Inc., which together sell more than half of the county’s PCs are earning praises from environmentalists for using more eco-friendly components and recycling their products when consumers discard them. But activists say far too much of the nation’s electronic garbage – not only PCs but also TVs, radios, batteries and other materials – still end up in landfills or get shipped overseas to poor countries where it pollutes the environment and exposes workers to dangerous chemicals. Discarded computers, televisions, radios, batteries, cell phones, cameras and other gadgets contain a stew of toxic metals and chemicals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, brominated flame retardants and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says American consumers generated nearly 2 million tons of electronic waste in 2005. Gartner estimates that 133,000 PCs are discarded by U.S. homes and business each day. HP recycled 16 billion pounds of hardware and ink cartridges globally last year, 16 percent more than the previous year. In the U.S., the company recycles about 50 million pounds at its plants in Roseville and in Nashville, Tenn. They do not send any of that waste stream to landfills or overseas. HP still charges for recycling, but consumers get a coupon that goes toward the purchase of new products. It also organizes collection drives at retail stores where consumers can drop off old gear for free.