It's a sunny, breezy Friday morning in Huntington Beach, and the parking lot of the Central Park Sports Complex looks like a cross between a Best Buy blowout and the Museum of Consumer Electronics.
The jetsam of America's love affair with electronic gadgetry is stacked on pallets as cars intermittently pull up to unload more televisions, computer monitors, cellphones and the odd electric fan.
Here's a wood-paneled Akai reel-to-reel tape deck, redolent of the '70s. Over there, a carton of cellphones, some as big as a shoe. And over here, a 36-inch TV that would look fine in any den -- if only it were HD-ready.
To Randy Lewis, all of this is more than castoff technology. It's the raw material that fuels his business, SoCal Computer Recyclers Inc. in Harbor City.
"Something like that we're going to tear apart for aluminum, plastics, circuit boards," he remarks while examining the Akai. "The wood's treated, so we can't do anything with it. It goes to the landfill."
Lewis will collect 45,000 pounds of discarded electronics over the two-day event, held in conjunction with Huntington Beach's Department of Public Works.
Partnering with cities that need help disposing of such materials is a standard tactic for Lewis and the more than 600 other recyclers and collectors of "e-waste" in California.
By now, he has developed an insider's knowledge of what lurks in the garages and attics of Southern California.
Checking out an ancient dot-matrix printer, Lewis observes: "It's not an event unless we get a copying machine, a coffee maker and a fan."
Household junk notwithstanding, e-waste recycling is a growth business in California these days. The amount of e-waste, which includes the packaging, generated each year in the United States grew by 17% from 2000 to 2005, making it the fastest-growing source of solid waste on the planet, said John Shegerian, chief executive of Electronic Recyclers International Inc. in Fresno.
Among the drivers are the changeover to new, feature-laden cellphones -- Americans toss out 130 million mobile phones a year, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates -- and the rapid replacement of TVs and computer monitors that use cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, with flat-panel devices.
The release last month of Vista, Microsoft Corp.'s first new computer operating system in five years, could add to the pile by prompting home computer users and businesses to invest in new PCs -- relegating older models to the waste stream.
