The only buyers are specialized recyclers, such as MBA Polymers in Richmond, Calif., a business that's developed a commercial process for recovering mixed plastics, or Micro-Metallics in San Jose, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian mining giant Noranda, Inc., which operates a smelter in Quebec.

Electronics recyclers like Micro-Metallics, says Schimenti, "get thousands of tons of circuit boards" each year, which they strip of recoupable components, like microprocessors and memory chips, before shipping them off to smelters. The end product is "a metal stream ... that is worth money based on the composition of the metals. It's got a lot of lead, because of all the solder connections, and there's also steel, aluminum and copper." Needless to say, smelting is a dirty business, and one that's heavily regulated in the United States and Canada. It's no coincidence that almost no smelting is done near the population centers of the Bay Area.

While the Noranda smelter is probably the largest consumer of electro-scrap generated in North America, it is a best-case scenario. Due to regulations and pollution laws, it's often cheaper to export the scrap to countries where such laws, if they exist at all, are more lax than those in Canada and the United States. Not surprisingly, reliable figures on the export of electro-scrap are hard to find, especially after the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes, which the United States refused to join, began monitoring and regulating "toxic trade" of hazardous materials between developed and developing nations. Even so, an estimated 1 million of the 1.7 million monitors recycled in 1997 were shipped abroad for disassembly and processing.

"There are a lot of countries that make a huge business in the processing, recycling, smelting and disassembly of electronics, and it is done in an environmentally unfriendly manner," Schimenti says. "Different countries have done it over the years, but when they reach a certain economic level, they stop." The perfect example is Taiwan, which only a decade ago was desperate for raw materials like copper, silver and steel. "So what did they do? They imported it [and smelted it themselves]. That's their source; they're not mining the stuff." Now that Taiwan is on its feet, it's no longer in the market for scrap.

After a tour through the HMR facility, filled like the Computer Recycling Center with towers of palletized, shrink-wrapped computer components, Schimenti takes me out to the warehouse yard, where I hear the scream of drills and the crack of plastics before noticing four workers, bent over a workbench, dismantling monitors stacked in refrigerator-sized crates. They break the monitors into five key components: the plastic casing, the metal chassis, the yoke, the circuit board and the cathode-ray tube. The tubes, looking like giant chocolate kisses, are thrown onto a conveyor belt and carried into an environmentally sealed container to be crushed. The lead and glass are then separated with a heavy magnet and discharged for shipment as commodities.

"We deal with trailing-edge electronics," Schimenti tells me once we're inside. "The new Pentium 650, the new Mac G4 -- that's not us. We're trailing-edge. We're last year's stuff."

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Despite the fact that California requires cathode-ray tubes to be handled as hazardous waste, I found no mention of consumer electronics on the Web sites of local waste management agencies, including San Francisco's Hazardous Waste Management Program and Santa Clara County's Hazardous Waste Recycling and Disposal Program. These programs provide detailed instructions on what to do with wastes such as aerosols, antifreeze, used tires and motor oil, but they share a glaring omission of electronics, with the exception of used batteries.

The one local program I found that did mention electronics -- the city of Mountain View's -- did more to discourage computer recycling than help it along: "Electronic equipment ... has too many intricate parts for recycling to be economical," the site reads. "It is labor intensive to separate the multiple, and sometimes minuscule, material types for recycling, and markets aren't readily available for small quantities of some of the material types. Therefore, recycling of electronic equipment is not common at this time."

Would the folks in Mountain View, Silicon Valley's ground zero, really rather have local companies like Netscape, Rambus, Veritas and scores of start-ups dump their old lead-filled monitors and circuit boards in the local landfill?

I have to assume not -- but why do they make information on recycling e-junk so hard to obtain? Robert Haley, residential and special projects coordinator at the SF Recycling Program, says "the thing about solid waste [administrators] is that every new product that gets invented, we have to then figure out what it is and deal with it. It takes us a little while to catch up."

"That's why the producers have to get involved. They know what's in there, yet a lot of times they won't tell us because it's proprietary," adds Haley. A good example is the new flat-panel displays, which some organizations believe contain the kinds of gases that contribute to global climate change. No one knows for sure, however, because the industry won't say. "Are [the manufacturers] thinking about what's going to happen with these displays two years from now? They're not required to, but they should be. That should be part of their job."

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