News

Curbside electronics recycling is here! Tell your landlord to sign up

Father...why have you abandoned us... via Flickr user Timothy Clough
Father…why have you abandoned us… via Flickr user Timothy Clough

Got an old printer just sitting around, gathering dust in your apartment, not printing anything? Of course you do, because consumer electronics get obsolete at the speed of light at this point. You’d like to throw the thing out, but if you just leave it on the curb, your landlord will get a big ticket and then you’ll catch hell for it. What to do? Oh, lucky for you, you live in a building with more than 10 units, so you can your fellow tenants can convince your landlord to sign up for the city’s new curbside electronics pickup.

The city has just started the e-cycleNYC program, which depending on the size of your building, will either provide a space for you to store dead electronics, a recycling box to place them in or even through building-wide recycling events scheduled by your landlord. Sounds like a great way to meet your neighbors and bond over your shared bafflement that you ever owned a Virtual Boy.

Finally, recycling that Apple IIE that you inexplicably have sitting around the apartment can be disposed of responsibly without lugging it to the LES Ecology Center. Not that we don’t love them, but sometimes you don’t want to go all the way to Gowanus with an old fax machine. Actually, you never really want to do that. But don’t forget, you can’t sign your building up for it yourself, so grab a couple neighbors for extra leverage, call the landlord and tell him to fill out the enrollment form for it.

2 Comments

    • Timothy Clough

      As the original photographer, I can guarantee you that it is Not an art installation; they really were getting rid of all that old stuff.

      The photo, however, to me is kind of an “artistic documentary”, as oxymoronic as that may be.

Leave a Reply