idents pay a $10 fee for dropping off CRT monitors. “The only reason for not bringing it in is pure laziness,” says Brian Dickerson, BLH’s co-owner.

For televisions, it costs residents of participating communities $20 per set and $50 for everyone else. Additionally, BLH exports no materials overseas.

Dickerson says recycling e-waste hasn’t quite caught on in the same way that recycling other items such as plastic and glass bottles have — in fact, 80 percent of people nationally still chuck electronics in with the regular garbage — but people are now starting to get the idea. In 2008, BLH recycled 1.2 million pounds of e-waste and is on track to surpass that amount this year. So far this year, the company has recycled 190,000 pounds of monitors, 33,000 pounds of printers, 12,500 pounds of keyboards, 12,000 pounds of hard drives and 13,000 pounds of cardboard.

“We’ve become a disposable culture,” Dickerson says. “If given the choice between something old and something new, you want something that’s bright and shiny and new.” Back in the old days of personal computing, Dickerson says, “People would spend $2,000 to $3,000 on a computer and it was an investment. You took care of it. You fixed it when it got broken. You treated it like it was a car.” But today, computers and other personal technology devices “are built to the lowest common denominator” — the average lifespan of a flat screen monitor is three years, he points out — and usually cost more to repair than they’re worth.

BLH’s motives aren’t purely altruistic, however. “Pound for pound, there’s more gold in a computer than there is in ore,” Dickerson says, but firms like his know how to safely retrieve it. Another problem is that dumping e- waste is perfectly legal. That will soon change. In 2008, the Illinois General Assembly passed and then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed into law a bill that requires electronics manufacturers to collect e-waste at no charge to customers. Starting in 2012, Illinois landfills will be prohibited from knowingly accepting e-waste, the burning of which would also be outlawed.

In the meantime, Dickerson says, “Everyone is faced with two choices: you can dispose of your computer in an environmentally safe way or you can be part of the problem.”

Contact R.L. Nave at [email protected].

Got a working Pentium III or higher? You can donate those to Springfield-based not-for-profit ComputerBanc (1023 E. Washington St.; 528-9506; http://computerbanc.org) which refurbishes machines for academically at-risk kids and provides technology for schools and other nonprofits.