17 Monitors

I really wanted to try and grab all these monitors and find homes for them, but their time on the street (outside an NYU office) was short - they were being loaded on a truck for recycling. I spoke to one of the truckers and asked about their condition. He was fairly vague and non-specific. My gut feel, though, was that these were being tossed and replaced by flat screen LCD monitors, a common scenario nowadays. After all, what is the likelihood of 17 virtually identical monitors failing at the same time or failing over time and being stored? I have acquired many CRT monitors recently for free including high end graphics models - many excellent quality monitors are being given away or being sold very cheaply (check out craigslist in your area) as people replace them with more compact LCDs. Disposal of electronics in NYC is a huge problem. In my office it took us at least a year to find a way to dispose of our computers, printers etc.. Our first choice was to donate the working items for reuse (many of the items still functioned.) No luck at all - our computers were even rejected by an agency that donates computers to the underprivileged in Africa - our computers were too old for them to accept. When the reuse approach was clearly not viable, we decided to recycle them. We still had difficulty - we tried non-profit organizations and private for-profit companies. The city does have a recycling program - it requires dropping off, has infrequent recycling days and limits individuals to one item at a time - impractical for a business with many items to dispose of. We finally found a wonderful non-profit organization to work with (Per Scholas) that even arranged to pick up. However, we did have to pay per component to get them recycled ...