All of us have a lot of electronics in our homes and my wife and I are no exception. The problem has been what to do with these things when they break or we replace them. Unless you live in an apartment complex you couldn’t just take things out to the dumpster and toss them in there, and since many of these things are monitored by cameras now, you can’t just drive to one of them to dump your stuff in either (not that I’d do that; cough).

I finally decided it was time to figure out where to get rid of the growing pile of stuff accumulating in the garage because we were running out of space. The first call I made was to our trash collector, Feher Rubbish. The lady there told me there was a minimum dollar amount of $10 to start taking some stuff, but she couldn’t tell me how much it would cost me overall. I didn’t care, as I didn’t want to pay for it. She gave me the phone number for OCRRA (Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency), saying maybe they could help.

I gave them a call and made my pitch. She told me about this new electronics law that stated that if you buy any electronics in New York as of April 1st that those retailers had to take your old equipment. I thought that was wonderful but said I had existing items and had to get rid of them. She then led me to this page on their website which lists a number of businesses around town that are set up to take your electronics.

I thought that was pretty neat, and I saw Bruin Computer Trading on the list, as well as Best Buy. But Bruin is closer and my friend Scott had taken our old computers to earlier in the day; talk about serendipity. I gave them a call and I asked the guy I got on the phone if I could bring my electronics to him. I told him I defined electronics as anything one could plug into a socket to run on electricity. He said yes, everything; computer keyboards, no.

That was okay by me. Into the car went the broken fan, the broken microwave, the broken TV (on the website it says they don’t take TVs, but that was before 4/1), the broken lawn equipment… everything we’d stashed in the garage, and it all luckily fit into my car. We drove over to Bruin and were directed to the side of the building, where they had all these bins with mainly computer items in them. I guess they’ve always taken computers, but now they were taking all the other stuff as well. All it took was 5 minutes and we were closing up shop and heading back home.

What a major relief! I love when a new law is passed that I don’t know about that benefits me. Well, except I still have no idea where to throw away big items that aren’t electronics, such as those keyboards and some old luggage. Maybe you can tell me?