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30 Dec 03 - electronics; iPod; used building materials; holidays; cars ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive --------------------- Excerpted from an item by Peter Meyers in the 12/23/03 Wall Street Journal: HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS The growing world of "refurbished" products presents opportunities to save money on electronics. Most brand-name manufacturers take items that have been returned (in some cases unused), put them through a battery of tests, spiff them up and then resell them at up to 75 percent off the store price. Almost all come with warranties (though some expire sooner than with new units), and extended warranties are also available. Merchants from Dell to Apple to IBM are funneling hundreds of thousands of refurbished products back into the market every year, mainly because it costs more to destroy than sell them. Look for these products - sometimes called "reconditioned" or "certified used" - on the company's website under the link "outlet" or "special deals." Amazon, eBay and other online retailers have their own "refurb" sales, covering everything from appliances to power tools. --------------------- Excerpted from an article by Hank Stuever in the 12/20/03 Washington Post (forwarded by David Flora): THROWAWAY IPOD Casey Neistat is a 22-year-old multimedia artist who lives in Lower Manhattan, so it almost goes without saying that he's got an Apple iPod, and that he loves it. But his love was tested when his iPod went cold, and he could not bring it back to life. It is the essential talisman of our yoga-tech times: Ownership of an iPod - a credit-card-size, white-and-metallic digital music player - has grown a bit culty, especially when people talk about how it has completely changed their inner musical lives. An iPodder has a telltale white cord coming from his coat pocket to his ears and walks around in a kind of perpetually happy glaze, with his entire music collection - as many as 10,000 songs - going with him. According to Apple, there are about 1.4 million iPods in current use worldwide. Neistat bought his iPod in early 2002, not long after Apple introduced it. In late October, 2003 - after about 18 months of use - the rechargeable lithium-ion battery in Casey Neistat's iPod would no longer work. When he contacted Apple, in person at their New York store and several times over the phone, he got the run-around. This is when Neistat and his brother Van made a two-minute, guerrilla-style film about deceit and revenge called "iPod's Dirty Secret" and put it on the Internet, where nearly 1 million people have seen it. It starts with Casey Neistat calling Apple's tech support and explaining his battery problem to someone named Ryan. He is told by Ryan that, since his iPod is past the year-long warranty, the cost of parts, labor and shipping will nearly equal the cost of a new machine. So, Ryan suggests, Neistat should probably just relax and buy a new iPod, which currently costs from $299 to $499, depending on the memory size. The Neistats' funky but wrathful movie (http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com) ends with scenes of Casey strolling around Manhattan, spray-painting dozens of Apple's pretty pastel iPod posters with the stenciled warning, ""iPod's Unreplaceable Battery Lasts Only 18 Months." Days after the movie made the rounds, Apple announced expanded warranties for new iPod owners to purchase for $59, and also introduced a new $99 battery-replacement mail-in service for others. Apple officially denies that the brothers' movie had anything to do with the new battery price. In fact, says Natalie Sequeira, an Apple spokeswoman, the longer warranty and replacement price have been in the works for a few months. When you buy an iPod, nothing in the fine print of the owner's manual prepares you for the eventual, final power drain, or gives you any estimate of how far down the road death awaits. This appears to be less an omission or deceit on Apple's part and more of a callous assumption: All electronics go to heaven, kids. Apple and other manufacturers are carefully pushing consumers further away from the battery age, when consumers could try to fix broken things, or replace their power sources. Anyone who wears disposable contact lenses knows how these things evolve: At first, having lived through the days of crawling on hands and knees in shag carpeting looking for a lost contact lens, you cannot immediately adapt to a future in which we now blissfully wash month-old contact lenses down the drain. After a while it doesn't seem like such a costly tragedy. People now spend a few hundred dollars every other year or so on disposable lenses, but it took a slight mental shift to get there. Same with electronics: Cell phone owners can replace their lithium batteries with relative ease, since phones are designed for batteries that snap on and off, but many consumers opt instead to get a newer, cooler, smaller phone at that point. (The iPod, by its irresistible design, is sealed tight like an alien spaceship from the Planet Groovy, with no visible seams or openings.) Laptop computers, meanwhile, almost seem born with a genetic disposition to chronic fatigue syndrome when it comes to the life span of their rechargeable batteries. To own one is to immediately suspect that something is wrong with the spark in the relationship; indeed, things are petering out faster and faster. Televisions and VCRs have been showing up in people's weekly trash for years - no one even stops to examine them or salvage them. Some of the e-mail the Neistat Brothers received after they made "iPod's Dirty Secret" came from people who were quick to tell them "that we're (bleeping) imbeciles, (because) you can buy a battery online and do it yourself," Casey says. The brothers already tried that, but it didn't work. And soon enough, Casey Neistat went back to the Apple boutique and bought a new iPod for $400, which, he says, "is totally unfair." He took it back to the office and showed it to his brother, and they vowed to find a way, Casey says, "to get back at them." But the beat went on, and that's what counts most in a world gone iPod. --------------------- Excerpted from an article by Brian Pontolilo in the Dec. 2003/Jan. 2004 issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine (forwarded by Thor Peterson): NEW TREND IN HOME-IMPROVEMENT STORES: REUSE CENTERS OFFER USED BUILDING MATERIALS AT FAR BELOW ORIGINAL PRICE Whether you are trying to build on a budget, are looking for a vintage bathtub, or have leftover shingles you don't know what to do with, there's a new trend in home-improvement stores you should know about. Reuse centers are the thrift stores of the home-improvement industry, taking donated, used, and surplus building materials and reselling them for up to 80 percent less than the original price. Reuse stores are becoming popular nationwide. Some are private businesses, some nonprofit organizations. But their missions are the same: to keep usable building materials out of landfills and to provide a low-cost alternative to conventional hardware stores and home-improvement centers. The ReStore Home Improvement Center (http://www.restoreonline.org) in Springfield, Massachusetts, is an offshoot of the Center for Ecological Technology (CET). Although the primary goal of the store is to promote the reuse of building materials, proceeds support the CET's mission of teaching businesses, schools, and other organizations how to become more environmentally and economically sustainable . Habitat for Humanity has a nationwide chain of reuse stores (http://www.habitat.org/env/restore.html). The proceeds from these stores fund local Habitat affiliates' efforts to build houses in surrounding communities. An added benefit of nonprofit reuse stores is that donations are tax deductible. For contractors who would otherwise have to pay to dispose of waste, donating to reuse stores can provide big savings. Some stores, like Boston's Building Materials Resource Center (BMRC), focus on making materials available to lower-income households. The BMRC (http://www.bostonbmrc.org) prices items according to the consumer's income and holds weekend educational workshops on home-improvement and maintenance topics. The center also provides technical assistance at the homes of low- and moderate-income families for as low as $15 per hour. Other stores share the mission of keeping usable building materials out of the waste stream but operate for profit. Second Use (http://www.seconduse.com), a reuse store in Seattle, opened in 1994 and recovers up to 100 tons of usable building supplies every month. ------------------ Excerpted from an article by Teviah Moro in the 12/30/03 London (Ontario) Free Press: TRASH LEVELS PEAK OVER THE HOLIDAYS In London (a city in Ontario, Canada, with a population of about 340,000), garbage volume jumps by as much as 30 per cent after Christmas, according to Jay Stanford, who manages garbage collection for the city of London. It takes two weeks for trash levels to return to normal, he said. "It's not surprising to see those trucks out at seven or eight at night," Stanford said. After Christmas, trash collectors make as many as three trips a day to the landfill to dump post-holiday waste. "The same thing really happens with the recycling system," Stanford said. The volume of recyclables, including cardboard, boxboard, cans and plastic bottles, jumps 50 or 60 per cent during the holidays. ------------------ Excerpted from an article by Amanda Bohman in the 12/28/03 Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner: HOLIDAY TRASH KEEPS TRANSFER STATIONS BUSY University Refuse, a company that has the largest residential trash hauling contract in the Fairbanks area, reports that the amount of post-Christmas garbage collected was about 5 percent more than last year. The company dumped 421,560 pounds - almost 211 tons - of trash into the landfill on Friday, Dec. 26. That's about 5 pounds for every man, woman and child in the borough, and that's not even including the volume of trash within Fairbanks city limits, which is dealt with by the city Public Works Department. Numbers from the city could not be obtained. University Refuse, a contractor for the Fairbanks North Star Borough, is responsible for moving trash from transfer sites outside Fairbanks city limits to the borough landfill. On Saturday, Dec. 27, workers were bracing for another day of high volume. Normally, the company hauls 45 to 50 tons of trash a day and as much as 60 tons on Sundays. Collecting after-Christmas garbage is the second busiest time of the year - post-July 4 is the first - for University Refuse, according to manager Jon Gleason. "There's an increase of food garbage because of Christmas dinners, but the majority of it is Christmas wrapping," Gleason said. If the volume of garbage is an economic indicator for a community, then residential trash hauled from everywhere but inside Fairbanks city limits shows that Christmas spending this year was slightly up, Gleason said. "Garbage tells if people are spending money or not." The city of Fairbanks doubled its workforce of curbside trash gatherers on Friday to make up for the day off on Christmas Day, said Dave Jacoby, Public Works director. Jacoby said the day after Christmas is behind both Jan. 2 and the day after the Super Bowl as far as the busiest trash days for the city. Like University Refuse, the city also sees its volume of trash peak highest in the summer. The spike happens when people start cleaning their lawns. ------------------ Excerpted from a column by James Schembari in the business section of the 12/28/03 New York Times, and from the Vehicle Donation Processing Center website: OLD CARS CAN BECOME GOOD DEEDS The Vehicle Donation Processing Center is a for-profit company that administers car donation programs for about 200 non-profit organizations around the U.S. Its website, which lists all the participating charities, is at: http://www.donate-your-car.com Some non-profits, such as the American Cancer Society (http://www.cancer.org), run their own car donation program. The Cancer Society says it receives about 18,000 cars a year, raising about $5 million. The Cancer Society usually doesn't accept cars from 1987 or earlier. The Vehicle Donation Processing Center says it generally will not take non-running domestic cars that are more than 15 years old. Many of the organizations make donating easy. They mail the paperwork to the owner, who signs over the title and mails everything back. Usually within days, a tow-truck operator calls to make an appointment to haul the car away. The hardest part is coming up with the fair market value for the Internal Revenue Service. - end -