There are hundreds of millions of televisions in households across the United States. Many of these are actively used, but others are obsolete models people do not need or want anymore. The question for the owners of those TVs then becomes: what to do with these old TVs?
When your old tv set is no longer useful to you, you may wonder what to do with it. If the TV still works properly, you can consider donating it. However, if your old tv set is broken, you must dispose of it properly.
What to do With Your Old TVs
Getting rid of an old TV is more difficult than disposing of regular trash because it is considered e-waste and will pollute the environment. When people don’t want to learn how to dispose of an old TV properly, they often keep them in their homes for years beyond their useful lives, or, unfortunately, they disregard e-waste laws and throw out their televisions in the regular trash. They also illegally dump them on the side of the road or elsewhere.
Whether you throw out your old TVs or dump them anywhere at all, the fact is that you are harming the environment. You might wonder how this is possible. Televisions, especially older models, contain heavy metals that can leach into soil and groundwater and pollute ecosystems nearby.
It is for this reason that we at Newtech Recycling are so enthusiastic about electronic recycling in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. We know that what we do helps clean the environment for future generations. We are also experts in our industry, and we feel it is our responsibility to apply our knowledge to improve our part of the planet.
We believe that the best way to dispose of an old TV is to recycle it.
Why You Should Never Take Your Old TV Set to the Landfill
If you have never researched the life cycle of a television set or other types of large electronics, you might find it interesting to know what happens to TVs after they have outlived their use. The fate of televisions is really up to their owners, of course, so we will discuss the landfill and e-waste recycling scenarios to leave nothing unexplained.
Throwing away your old televisions will sentence them to the destination of most other garbage: the landfill.
Landfills are sites where large amounts of trash are physically compacted and stored. Most municipal solid waste–the kind that is collected curbside from households and dumpsters across the country–is first placed on an area of ground lined with clay and a thin sheet of plastic. The waste is packed into hills as tightly as possible. When an area of a landfill can hold no more waste, the hills are sealed off from the air with clay and another plastic sheet. This is then covered with dirt and vegetation. In newer landfills, the dirty fluids called leachate that seep out of the trash–particularly from e-waste–are collected in pipes and handled as wastewater.
However, the garbage in older landfills is not quarantined from the environment. That is because leachate can flow directly into the earth due to the absence of those clay and plastic liners.
Why is this a problem, as in the case of old TV sets? It is because televisions produce leachate composed of multiple heavy metals that severely pollute the earth when they break down out of the devices and enter the ground. Depending on the age of the TV, those metals can include cadmium, lead, and mercury. Human or animal exposure to these metals–from polluted groundwater, for instance–has been linked to cancer.
Landfills are not inherently bad; after all, our garbage has to go somewhere. The problem lies in what we choose to place in those landfills. So, what can you do with an old TV? As an alternative to throwing it into a landfill and harming the environment, Newtech Recycling suggests recycling your old TV with us!
Why Recycling Old TVs is Better
Recycling your televisions with an electronic recycling company near you is a much better choice than the landfill because those entities know how to properly remove the harmful materials in your e-waste before disposing of the rest.
At our recycling facility in New Jersey, we operate equipment that safely separates heavy metals from the other components of a TV. We then organize all the materials we pull out of those devices, so we know what we have–aluminum, glass, copper, etc.
Any safe materials we derive from your old electronics are returned back to the raw-goods market, where they are recycled to be used again in production. We then dispose of the harmful metals and other elements safely so they cannot be released into the environment. Our electronic recycling process is immediately more attractive than casting old TV sets into landfills only to watch them leach metals into the ground.
On top of that, Newtech Recycling also likes to make your e-waste recycling convenient for you. If you have a collection of old TVs in your home or office that you need to get rid of, we can come to you to pick them up and bring them to our recycling facility.
We have the means to recycle your e-waste, and you will have peace of mind knowing that you disposed of your old televisions and other electronics responsibly. Furthermore, when you recycle your old TV, you guarantee the parts will be salvaged and eventually reused in other electronics, thereby helping to save resources all around.
What to Do with an Old TV in New Jersey and Beyond
Newtech Recycling is a leading e-waste recycling company in New Jersey and the Tri-state area. We do our part to reduce e-waste being dumped into landfills. That is our mission, and it is what drives us.
When it comes time to decide what to do with your old TV, you must consider the environmental impact seriously. Televisions contain heavy metals that have no place in our soil or groundwater. You can help to prevent this kind of pollution by contacting an electronics recycling company to haul away your obsolete TVs and dispose of them properly.
If you live in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut, contact Newtech Recycling today to get a quote on your TV recycling and help build a better future for us all.