My hometown figures out that e-cycling matters

I want to take a moment to congratulate my hometown of Westport, Connecticut, for beginning a program to collect electronics waste for recycling six days a week at the town dump.

As you can see in this photo, the town has parked a trailer near all the other recycling bins, and residents can bring their old TVs, computers, monitors, fluorescent bulbs, and cell phones for dumping every day except Sunday. This is a vast improvement over the way e-waste has traditionally been collected in Westport and is still collected in most other towns.

You know the drill: Look through the local newspaper to find a special electronics waste collection event over at the high school or in the Wal-Mart parking lot once or twice a year. That kind of thinking has got to change.

As more and more of us buy and replace more and more electronic gear more and more frequently, our communities simply must figure out ways to keep all that e-trash out of landfills. It's just too toxic to be buried.

As I've noted before, it's worth doing a bit of online research to find local disposal solutions, most notably at Earth911.org, which has one of the most complete listings of electronics recycling options organized by location.

Let's clean this country up! What is your town doing?

Don Willmott's blog posts are provided by LifeWire, a part of The New York Times Company.