Recycling IT components

As an environmentalist, I often run up against the problem of clients who want to dispose of things but don't want to pay to have them recycled or disposed of properly. Unfortunately, we're not at a point in this country where we have free electronics recycling, but there are some things that HAVE TO BE recycled. One example is rechargeable batteries. As an example, I have one client who has an old APC UPS. It's nonfunctional, but it has a 10 pound battery inside that cannot be thrown away. As of the last time I investigated this, I had to pay for APC to take back one of their batteries unless I wanted a replacement. As such, I did then what I'm doing today. I looked up local places that take recycled batteries. Here is the site:

http://earth911.org/

and here is the link to battery recycling:

http://www.earth911.org/master.asp?s=ls&serviceid=126

recycling used cell phones

I was very pleased today to see that Palm offers free cell phone recycling.

http://www.palm.com/us/support/contact/environment/recycle.html

I guess with the size of cell phones, it's trivially easy to dispose of them in an environmentally friendly way - or they may be usable somewhere else. I've long been dissatisfied with the options for recycling computers. The options are not widely known and so many computers end of landfills. Personally, my clients and I end up recycling computers by donating them to The National Cristina Foundation.