You put the old television at the curb, the truck came, and the television is still there. It happens again the next week. This is not your hauler being lazy or missing it. Under Illinois law, a long list of electronics cannot go into a landfill at all, so your garbage service is not allowed to take it with the household trash. Here is what is covered, what your real options are, and the one thing to do before any computer leaves your house.

It Is the Law, Not a Preference

Illinois passed the Electronic Products Recycling and Reuse Act, and since 2012 it has been illegal to dump covered electronic devices in Illinois landfills. That ban is why waste haulers across the state leave them behind, and why you cannot simply pay a little extra to make the problem go away at the curb.

The reason behind it is straightforward. Electronics contain lead, mercury, cadmium, and flame retardants that should not be sitting in a landfill, and they also contain steel, aluminum, copper, and glass that are worth recovering. Recycling them is both the safer and the less wasteful answer, which is why the state made it the only legal one.

What Counts as Covered

The list is broader than most people assume. Televisions of every type, computer monitors, desktop computers, laptops, tablets, printers and scanners, fax machines, keyboards and mice, VCRs and DVD players, digital converter boxes, cable and satellite receivers, portable digital music players, video game consoles, small scale servers, and electronic keyboards.

In practice, if it plugs in and has a circuit board in it, assume it needs to be recycled rather than trashed and check before you set it out.

Old Tube and Rear-Projection TVs Are the Hardest Ones

A CRT television, the deep boxy kind, and the giant rear-projection sets that followed are the worst of the bunch on both counts. They are extremely heavy for their size, often well over a hundred pounds for a large set, with all of that weight in a shape that has nothing good to grab.

They also contain leaded glass in the picture tube, several pounds of it, which is exactly what the landfill ban exists for. Recyclers handle CRT glass as its own stream, and some charge a fee to take it. That fee is real, it is not a made up charge, and any honest hauler will have it built into the price they quote you rather than added on afterward.

Your Actual Options

  • County collection. Will, DuPage, and Kane counties all run electronics recycling, some at permanent drop-off sites and some as scheduled collection events. Check your county's site for current locations, hours, and item limits, because they change and some sites cap how many TVs you can bring.
  • Retailer take-back. Some electronics retailers accept certain items, often with limits on size and quantity and sometimes with a fee for televisions. Worth checking if you have one small item and you are going there anyway.
  • Manufacturer programs. A number of manufacturers run mail-in or drop-off programs for their own products, which is most useful for small items rather than a sixty pound TV.
  • Have it picked up. If it is heavy, if it is in a basement, if there are several of them, or if you do not own a vehicle that fits a large television, this is the practical answer. We take it to an approved recycler as part of a normal pickup.

Wipe Your Data First

This is the step people skip and later regret. Before any computer, laptop, tablet, phone, or even a printer leaves your house, get your data off it.

Sign out of accounts, then do a full factory reset or secure erase rather than just dragging files to the trash. Deleting a file does not remove it from the drive. For a desktop where you are unsure, pulling the hard drive and keeping it is a perfectly reasonable option, and the machine still recycles fine without it. Remember that modern printers, copiers, and some smart TVs store information too: printers keep documents and network credentials, and a smart TV holds your streaming logins.

A recycler is not going to go through your drive, but the right time to handle this is before the device leaves your control, not after.

How We Handle Electronics

We take televisions of any size and age, monitors, computers, printers, stereo equipment, and the box of cables that comes with all of it, and we take them to an approved electronics recycler rather than a landfill. The old tube TV from the basement and the rear-projection set nobody can lift are both normal jobs for us.

Appliances go the same way. Fridges, freezers, and air conditioners contain refrigerant that has to be recovered by someone set up to do it, and the metal is worth recycling. See appliance removal, or read about getting rid of old appliances and where the rest of it ends up.

Old TVs and electronics piling up? Call or text Onit Junk Removal at (815) 240-0735. We haul them to an approved recycler across Plainfield, Naperville, and the surrounding suburbs.

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