Reuse vs Recycling
When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) produced a tool for comparing the environmental benefits of reuse and recycling electronics as compared to sending them to a landfill, it seemed natural to want to compare reuse benefits to reclycling.
The greatest environmental impact comes during the initial manufacturing of computers, monitors and printers. Raw resources are mined, oil for plastics is drilled,air and water are polluted - all during the manufacturing process.
We produced a paper using the EPA calculator that compares the benefits of reuse over just recycling. Recycling is good if the products have reached their "end of life" where they no longer have a viable market. Most systems, however, are often slower than the current products or need to be reloaded or have other kinds of simple repair. There is such a demand for low cost, guaranteed computer systems that it seems a waste to destroy them through recycling before their end of life.
Read our summary comparing Reuse vs Recycling. You can produce your own summary of the products you want to donate by visiting the revised EPA calculator. Recycled products are much preferable to landfilling discards as there is a commodity value for the demanufactured products. But as you can see reuse is over 25 times better for the environment than just recycling.