Recycle old electronics and see green

Few Digital Slobs are what you'd call eco-extroverts. We all have our reasons for being less than environmentally friendly, some more complicated than others.

Personally, I'm no tree hugger because as a boy, I slammed into one that was covered in poison oak while trying to catch a football. My face looked like a meat-lover's pizza in all our Christmas photos that year.

Others remember watching that episode of NOVA where Carl Sagan told us the sun will become a red giant and gobble up Earth -- incinerating it and everything on it -- in about 5 billion years. For Slobs, this expands our "why make our bed because it's only going to get messed up later" philosophy to the cosmic level.

Still, it's true. Half a trillion years from now, everything is going to be instantly "recycled." Your descendants. My descendants. Nuclear waste. Backstreet Boys CDs. That can of beets that's been sitting in my cupboard since 1989. Even the mounds of hate mail I'm sure to get for seemingly disparaging the environmental cause. Everything must and will burn.

But before you get too comfortable on your Styrofoam couch, nude in the middle of winter with the thermostat up to 85, watching TV on a homemade entertainment center made out of 14 old car batteries, consider this: We might not own the planet, but we've got a very, very long-term lease, and until we hand over the keys, it might be a good idea to keep everything organized, unless you want to spend 40,000 years trying to figure out what's causing that strange odor to seep out of the Northern Hemisphere.

So, can Slobs be motivated to save the earth? Well, you'd be surprised to learn that when it comes to recycling, Slobs are quite capable of making the difficult, selfless choice. All you have to do is make it easy and make it worth our while.

Fortunately, a new Web site has tapped into this formula perfectly. The folks at myboneyard.com will gladly pay you for your old, outdated electronics. Just tell them what you've got, give them your address, and they'll mail you a shipping label so you can send it to them for free. Once they get it, they'll give it a once-over and send you a prepaid credit card with an amount on it equal to the item's appraised value.

Remember that laptop you bought five years ago that promised to change your world, and now all it's changing is the corner of your garage from eggshell white to a kind of corroded lithium cream? Well, myboneyard.com will give it to a nice couple who have a farm where it can run and play forever and ever.

Well, no, they're going to destroy it, but you can face that, right? If not, just go to Burger King and eat your grief away with your newfound $11.

Eleven dollars? That's right, don't expect eBay-level returns on your circa 1998 Dell desktop. Sure, you might work the phones and get a better price, but will you? Of course not. Nobody ever does. That takes work. Life is short. Just take the money and run.

I wonder what they'd give me for a vintage can of beets?

Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's production editor. Reach him at cbrandao@starbulletin.com. See also: www.digitalslob.com