You'll get fined $100 per every item you add to e-waste

Dec 30, 2014 14:53 GMT  ·  By

There's been a lot of fuss over recycling and how everyone should do it, especially to electronics that are invariably filled with materials not at all friendly to the environment. The city of New York is really laying down the law this time though.

E-waste has always been a problem, ever since the first computer broke and had to be thrown away somewhere.

Landfills are already a blight on the land, but e-waste is particularly good at destroying the environment compared to everything else.

That's why there's been an increasingly loud movement to persuade people to recycle those things properly, to take them to specifically-designated drop-off points where they may be taken apart and reused for making other things.

The city of New York has decided to go from “insistent encouragement” to “you'll do as we say or you'll be very, very sorry.”

New Yorkers will be fined for every e-waste item

Starting next year, in 2015, anyone living in New York who throws away electronic devices alongside other, normal garbage will be fined.

And they won't be fined just a buck or two, but a hundred for every VCR, flash drive, MP3 player, printer and whatever else.

Instead, people who find themselves in need of getting rid of technological refuse can use manufacturers' take back programs, drop them off at Best Buy, mail them back to their makers, even go to a major drop-off center in some major cities, which New York is counted among. The Lower East Side Ecology Center is a good place to go in fact.

In broad terms, this is the first time a city tries to enforce accountability on citizens, in the quest to finally stop polluting the planet.

Not sure exactly how garbage truck crews will identify whom the discarded devices belong to if someone does break the new rule, but we'll let the authorities figure that out.

How to know if something qualifies as e-waste

It's as simple as knowing whether or not it has a printed circuit board. That means you won't be fined a hundred bucks for every discarded CD, since the point is to avoid spilling lead, cadmium, silver, gold and toxic materials like mercury all over the place. The cathode ray tubes in old TVs and monitors are particularly big offenders.

On a related note, New York is one of 20 states which don't accept e-waste in landfills, and some even consider e-waste as hazardous waste.