Similar design guidelines are in place at Hewlett-Packard, whose recycling facility in Roseville, Calif., is an encouraging example of how a large producer can responsibly dispose of its retired products and manufacturing overruns.

In the computer industry, "The cost of recycling -- because there is a cost, it doesn't happen for free and it doesn't generate positive revenues -- has never been a part of the commercial equation," says Renee St. Denis, an environmental manager at the Roseville facility, which began as an in-house operation salvaging repair parts from old HP product lines. "To this day, the industry-wide solution to what we call 'breakage'" -- the mixed plastics, metals and glass left over after cannibalization -- "is to put that stuff in a container and ship it to China."

In fact, when St. Denis joined the group in 1994, that's just what the Roseville plant was doing with breakage from 600,000 pounds of equipment recovered each month from its North American manufacturing plants, as well as from HP employees exchanging their own computers for newer models. "My job ... was to find out for sure what was happening [with the breakage]. I found out for sure, and didn't like it very much."

Soon after her arrival, all shipments to China had stopped, and St. Denis was coordinating with Micro-Metallics to jointly manage a recycling facility on-site, with the breakage disassembled in Roseville and sent directly to Noranda's smelter in Quebec. It may not be an ideal solution, but when dealing with 3.5 to 4 million pounds of recovered equipment per month -- the current volume processed at Roseville -- one can't do much better than ship the scrap to one of the largest, most monitored smelters in North America.

When asked for her position on producer responsibility, however, St. Denis chooses her words carefully. "What we talk about [at HP] is the concept of shared responsibility vs. extended producer responsibility ... Shared responsibility is the concept that there are several players along the value chain. Distributors get value out of our products, and even the consumer who uses the product at home or in the office gets some kind of value out of it."

"We feel the responsibility for how you dispose of it at end-of-life needs to be shared," she explains. "That doesn't mean that we think we shouldn't play a role or bear some of the cost; it just means that we shouldn't do it all."

Today, although Roseville gets a small but steady volume of equipment from commercial customers exchanging old equipment when purchasing new models, what goes on at places like Roseville is of little relevance to the average consumer. Individual users and small-to-medium businesses are more likely to purchase an HP product through a third-party distributor, such as a computer superstore or mail-order business, than from a sales representative who deals with large commercial customers. While an HP sales representative is prepared to take back end-of-life products as part of a purchase, try striking the same bargain with your CompUSA clerk next time you buy, say, a new Pavilion PC Minitower off the shelf. These days, more than half of all American households own a computer and one study, conducted six years ago at Tufts University, found that 75 percent of all computers ever bought in the United States are gathering dust in a closet, basement or garage. A report by the National Safety Council's Environmental Health Center found that in 1998, only 6 percent of computers were recycled compared to the number of new computers put on the market that same year. That same report estimated that by the year 2004, there will be nearly a third of a billion obsolete computers in the United States. Today the average life span of a computer is estimated to be about two years -- down from five years in 1997. We cannot just stockpile this stuff indefinitely; people need their space. Eventually the e-junk is going to get chucked.

Wyatt of the Computer Recycling Center tells me of a law firm that donated two dozen Pentium machines in May. "Their reasons for getting rid of the computers were speed, small hard drives, not enough RAM -- the usual complaints," he says. "The computers had the manufacturer stickers right on them." The stickers told when the computers were first put into service. The dates on the stickers? May, 1999.

It's not hard to believe. In my own company, it's rare that I'm able to repurpose a year-old computer without a manager interceding and authorizing new equipment. And the managers have a point: used computers, like used cars, are less reliable than new models. The entropy ratio is accelerating; computers are breaking down at faster rates. The approaching rule of thumb: one computer per user per year.

Why can't we just treat old computers like used toner cartridges, and ship them back to the manufacturer with a pre-paid return label? It's a logistical problem, says St. Denis: "It's easy with cartridges: the old one is exactly the same size as the new one, so it'll fit right in the packaging ... [Whereas] if you were to trade in your PC, it's probably a different size, a different shape; even the boxes have changed."

Meanwhile, agencies like the Solid Waste Management Program are rushing to classify and divert the increasing stream of electro-toxins from landfill. A new pilot program, begun Aug. 15 -- just a few weeks after my cruise in the U-Haul -- announced a free recycling service for obsolete and nonworking computers, with dropoff locations at eight San Francisco computer stores and four metal recyclers, including HMR-USA. Equipment dropped off at the stores will be picked up in bulk by the recyclers.

The program's next goal is to arrange for the capture of electronics directly at residential public disposal areas, or "transfer sites." For the time being, however, there's little hope for diversion (the legal term for the reduction or elimination of targeted materials from a waste stream).

Take a load of cathode-ray tubes to your local dump, as I did that morning on my drive to Santa Clara, and you won't find much resistance. In fact, workers at the Sanitary Fill Company at Candlestick Point, the main disposal site for San Francisco residents, gave me a blank look when I asked if they accepted old monitors. I pointed to the cathode-ray tubes in my U-Haul; they handed me a brochure with tonnage rates. To them, it was general refuse. I thanked them and got back on the freeway.

Contrast this with trying to dispose of tires, mattresses or household hazardous wastes such as paint, used oil, solvents, batteries or coolant. "Dump a mattress at the landfill, it could cost you a hundred bucks," Schimenti says. "[The waste companies] don't want them, and they're going to process them in a different way." They don't want them because, by law, the waste is marked for diversion. With the exception of Massachusetts, which in April became the first state to ban cathode-ray tubes from landfills, no such diversion exists for computer systems, despite the hazardous materials in their components.

Had I paid the $16 listed on the brochure, my cathode-ray tubes and lead-laden computers would have become part of the municipal waste stream, loaded onto containers and hauled to Altamont Landfill in Livermore. (San Francisco, despite a per-capita waste-generation rate 1.5 times that of the national average, does not have a landfill within city limits.) This same landfill made news last year when its operating company, Waste Management Inc., inadvertently dumped 6,000 cubic yards of lead-tainted dirt, disgorged from the infield of San Francisco's new ballpark, on the Altamont hills outside Livermore. The mistake cost taxpayers just under $1 million, the price of gathering up the spill and shipping it to a hazardous-materials dump in Kings County.

The point here is not negligence. It was actually the state and not Waste Management Inc. that was to blame in this case. The point is that lead and other toxins do not belong in Altamont or in municipal landfills anywhere. The cities know it, the states know it, the feds know it. Yet today, there's nothing to stop electronics, with their toxic cocktail of heavy metals, from getting dumped. The only reason we know about these hazardous materials is because of nonprofit watchdogs like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and taxpayer-funded agencies like the Solid Waste Management Board.

"We're still learning," Haley says. "We're trying to get the information and build the infrastructure, but really the industry has to come to the table and try to help with this. They're the ones making the money, they need to pay the infrastructure costs ... They're not going to do it unless someone compels them to do it, because right now they can make money without having to be responsible for it."

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