First, that old CRT television from the eighties isn’t doing any good in your home. Unless you like to play retro video games, you will have a better experience with a modern television.

Second, no television should be discarded with the regular trash. Televisions are full of hazardous waste such as cadmium and lead, which can cause great environmental problems. Most civil waste collection services won’t pick up televisions because of those dangerous chemicals, but free TV recycling providers like California Recycles can safely extract those chemicals and dispose them in an environmentally conscious way.

Third, you might think of donating your television to a second-hand store like Goodwill if it is still functional. That is a generous thought, but second-hand stores are often overloaded with hard-to-sell used televisions, so they rarely accept more stock.

Finally, just because your TV is old or even broken doesn’t mean it has no value. To a skilled recycling company, a TV has plenty of useful materials: recycled glass, steel, aluminum, and copper are useful in many industries, so it is worthwhile to extract them. What’s better, if the TV isn’t in poor condition, we can reuse instead of recycle. Often, we can harvest TV screens and circuit boards and use them to repair a different TV. This allows us to reuse those useful materials and produce a refurbished TV for sale, efficiently using old materials and saving the world a bit of carbon.