This is going to sound judgmental, but it really isn’t.

The previous owners of our place on St. Peters Church Road used the property as a dump.

We knew this from the start, and what’s more, we’d been warned that there was very limited garbage pickup service in the neighborhood — and no county landfill. So over the years, in addition to driving our kitchen garbage down to Baltimore, we’ve been slowly tidying things up.

There was the junk pile by the pole barn that had to be excavated with heavy equipment. There was the trench full of old crockery by the little pond. The coils of rusted barbed wire down by the creek, mysteriously filled with broken glass. The goat skeletons above the ravine. Not to mention the outbuildings in various stages of collapse, most of them piled high with vintage refuse.

Each year, as the vegetation died back in the winter, we’d find a new cache — after all, there have been settlers living at our address continuously since the 18th century, and native Americans for time out of mind before that. (Although to be fair, the native peoples were a lot thriftier than we are and lived a “sustainable” lifestyle, meaning they left very little behind that the earth couldn’t readily absorb.)

This year, we found a particularly unhappy surprise down below the big pond: a small heap of electronics submerged in the muck.

I’d been considering getting a roll-off container for a general clean-up, so I called Cocolamus Creek Disposal to find out what I could and couldn’t put in a dumpster.

TVs?

Absolutely not! As of January, 2013, to comply with the Pennsylvania Covered Device Recycling Act (CDRA), which was signed into law by Governor Rendell in 2010, landfills stopped accepting TVs, computers, and the like — so-called “e-waste.”

This means that private contractors like Cocolamus no longer have a place to dump electronics. “I’m over in Landisburg,” I said. “Where should I take these old TVs?”

They told me to try the Mifflin County Solid Waste Authority in Lewistown. So I called Lewistown and spoke with a very helpful employee who explained that, yes, I could bring in my TVs, but that e-waste had been streaming in from Mifflin, Juniata, and Perry Counties, which was a real problem, since by law municipal transfer stations weren’t allowed to charge people for dropping these things off, but there was nothing extra in the budget to pay the recyclers. In other words, the clock was ticking. Mifflin County might not be able to accept its neighbors’ e-waste for much longer.

While she was explaining the seriousness of the situation, I looked up the directions from my house to Lewistown. “You’re more than an hour away from me!” I said. “And you’re the closest place I can take a TV?”

She agreed that the distance and the cost of gas were significant disincentives to a homeowner, who, after all, was simply trying to do the right thing. Electronics represent a tiny fraction of the trash that goes into a landfill, but account for 70%, by some estimates, of the toxic waste, including really nasty stuff like lead and mercury.

She suggested I call Cumberland County. So I did, only to learn that they don’t currently have an e-waste program. Cumberland County referred me to Dauphin County. “What town?” I asked.

“Harrisburg.”

So after I dug those dripping TVs out of the muck, I loaded them into the bed of my truck and hit the highway. The Dauphin County Recycling Center at 1620 South 19th Street, Harrisburg, wasn’t easy to find, but once I located the right building, parked, checked in, and produced an acceptable form of identification, I was directed to a loading bay where two helpful young men finally took the electronics off my hands.

You might think I had a resentful drive home, having sacrificed two and a half hours of a day off and a quarter of a tank of gas to my clean-up project, but actually, I was relieved. While I was waiting for my receipt at the recycling office, I noticed a poster on the wall that showed pictures of the kind of TVs they accept — unbroken ones — and the kind they don’t.

So if you happen to have an old TV set with a broken screen, congratulations! You’re the proud owner of a kind of trash that there is literally no way to get rid of, no matter how far you drive or how much you pay.

To be fair, the Covered Device Recycling Act of 2010 was high-minded expression of environmental policy. The law was designed to force electronics manufacturers to accept as many obsolete devices for recycling as they produced, thus shifting the cost of dealing with the toxic waste back to the source.

But like many laws that look good on paper, there have been unanticipated consequences on the ground. The landfills stopped accepting e-waste on schedule, but the manufacturers haven’t been able to keep their end of the bargain. This has led to a situation where homeowners who want to do the right thing are penalized for their civic-mindedness, and the easiest solution is simply to bury the problem in the back yard.

Perry County is wrestling with this problem by way of a task force, the Solid Waste Advisory Committee, which is on schedule to produce a new ten-year plan by October, 2015. These are smart and dedicated people, some of whom are volunteering their time and expertise to solve a problem with complicated environmental and fiscal dimensions.
But a ten-year plan is only as good as the political will — and the money — behind it. If you’d like to learn more or to get involved, a good place to start would be the Perry County Conservation District, on the Web at www.perrycd.org or by phone at 582-8988.