Tuesday, May 29, 2007

'Splain this...

A while back, our old 23-inch CRT television set spontaneously decided to remove red from the spectrum. Since there is a reason TV in shades of green never took off, and I like to take things apart to see how they work, I dissected the TV, leaving me with a plastic case and a TV picture tube with a few random TV guts attached. The latter item is somewhat tricky to dispose of, since it contains non-trivial amounts of lead and is under a vacuum that tends to make it go BOOM when the glass breaks. I left the tube in the utility room and conveniently forgot to call the trash company for several months about getting rid of it.

Well, tonight, I finally got around to calling them to see what sort of precautions I might need to take to dispose of it. Turns out, they can't dispose of a CRT tube alone, and couldn't find anywhere on the hazardous materials dropoff calendar that would fit that particular item. However, they can dispose of CRT television sets. So--and I asked specifically to clarify this--if I leave the dangerous part out at the curb, they can't do anything about it, but if I put the dangerous part back into the inert case, they will be happy to take it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Makes perfect sense to me :>S

Anonymous said...

Ranks up there with our phone company. Call them and ask them to safely bring the line down running through the limbs of the tree we were bringing down and they will charge you. Notify them later that we have broken the phone lines while we took down the tree and no charge. Be responsible or be reckless...huh?
-Took the lines down ourselves and put them back. Geez!