I have a 36" TV that I don’t use anymore. Works perfectly fine and is only 12 years old, but alas, the march of technology has rendered it a giant liability. I see lots of people trying to sell them for $20 on CL, or even giving them away. I recently recycled a 27" tube TV that was a few decades old and it cost me $27 ($1 per inch). If I can get someone to come haul it away for free I’d count that as a win.
Looking for advice from people who have successfully unloaded one of these behemoths. Do people selling them on CL for a song actually have any takers, or is that just wishful thinking?
Our county has recycling facilities that not only take paper and glass and metal, but old electronics. That’s where our old TVs went. Beyond that, I got nothing.
Yep. Recycle it. Google in your area. Some stores will take them back. You’ll get nothing for it on CL, etc. Future Shop and Staples will take them back here.
I’m not in the US, but my local authority has a recycyling depo where you can take anything - TVs, car batteries, xmas trees, whatever.
Otherwise, do you have something like Freecycle.org near you? Imagine ebay without the bidding and the exchange of money, basically you advertise anything you want to get rid of on the premise that whoever wants it (for free) has to come and collect it.
Like I said, recycling will cost me $36. I can try freecycle or whatever but I don’t want to waste my time taking pictures and listing it if nobody’s going to come and collect it, which is what I’d expect to happen. I see a lot of these listed but never any confirmation that there are actually any takers out there.
I got rid of one this summer; it weighed like 300 pounds. I’m not kidding. No one will pick it up. You need to Google recycle places near you as per post #3.
When my mother bought a new flat-screen TV to replace a 35" CRT set, I encouraged her to get the replacement from Best Buy because they would haul the old one away as part of the deal. The thing weighed something like 300lb so I figured it was better for them to take the thing than for us to try to move it ourselves.
Check the landfill. Our landfill has a special dumpster for electronics to be recycled and they fall under the general dumping fee which is like $30 per ton or something like that.
OK, thanks. Yeah, it’s about 250-300 lbs, there’s no way I’m dragging it out the curb, leaving it out in the elements, and pissing off my neighbors for an unknown period of time in the hopes that someone driving by will pick it up. If it were smaller/older/cheaper I would have recycled it already but I was curious if there were people out there interested in the bigger ones for any reason. It sounds like there aren’t.
Just FYI, we tried to get rid of a 33" tube TV a few years back, and found out that neither the Salvation Army nor Goodwill in the Dallas area would take them.
We ended up giving it away to a friend, but had that not happened, I’d have lugged the thing to the local transfer/recycling facility.
Yesterday I just watched my neighbor (a big strapping guy) and a young guy (a smaller but strapping guy) spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to move a large tube TV into the young guy’s truck. It seemed that both had some injuries that kept them from lifting in a particular way and they had to figure out how to get the TV up into the truck without either of them getting hurt.
You could feel the neighbor’s joy as he watched that thing drive away!
We have two old big-screen non-working TVs that we need to get rid of. I think my best option is to pay someone to take them away. I think that the city will take them if I arrange for a large item pickup, but there’s no way I and my disabled husband could get them out to the curb. So they sit, taking up space. The one in the living room does have a use though - the urns of our two deceased cats fit nicely on top. Can’t do that with a flat-screen.
In Washington state, thrift stores will take televisions and computers for recycling. Well, probably not the small, independently owned stores but all the big chains do. You could check to see if the ones in your area do too. Some of them also do pick-ups. Gather some stuff from around your house to donate (maybe see if a friend or relative wants to chip in too) and give Goodwill or another thrift store a call. Maybe that way, you won’t have to haul it yourself and you’ll be doing something good too.
I had to get rid of some old computer equipment by taking it to the local transfer station. An old disk drive, some IDE (ribbon-style) cables, stuff like that. It worked, but was so outdated that I couldn’t give the stuff away.
We have a local company that will take anything with a cord for free. They refurbish and sell on what they can, and dismantle for parts/recycling the rest. Perhaps there is a similar business near you?
