Recycling (Going Green)

[Allan-BBY Community Connector]

Hi Everyone,

This summer, Best Buy® rolled out a green initiative to 134 of our stores where a customer could bring in most of their old consumer electronics, and the Best Buy® store would recycle their old electronics for free. There were three categories where the customer was charged a $10 fee per item, but in return they would get a $10 Best Buy® gift card; the customer was not charged the $10 fee if the item was an exclusive brand (private Best Buy® label) item or in the state of California. The customer was limited to two items per day per household.  TVs larger than 32 inches, console TVs, air conditioners, de-humidifiers, microwaves, and appliances are not accepted by this program. If the customer wanted to recycle a desktop or laptop computer they were required to remove the hard drive first, which could be done by the customer or by the Geek Squad for $19.99. If you want to see a video on how to remove a computer hard drive yourself you click here. 

As of November of 2008 this initiative had removed 110,000 items from the waste stream, and I am happy to report that due to the success of this program and the positive feedback we have received from our customers, we started rolling this program out to all of the Best Buy® stores in the United States on 1/18/2009. As of Today 2/15/2009 this recycling program is in place in every store in the United States.

I was lucky enough to have lived in one of the test markets and had the opportunity to use this program first-hand, and I loved it. I was going to a Best Buy® store anyway to do some shopping, and I had an old TV that had been sitting in my basement forever so I brought it with me and I paid the store $10 to recycle the TV for me and they gave me a $10 gift card. Because of this program, Best Buy® offers recycling options for almost all of the electronics products we sell, and if you’re interested in seeing all of our recycling options you could find them on BestBuy.com.

[Allan-BBY Community Connector]

Hi Everyone,

I am happy to say that our recycling program has once again been expanded to provide more options for our customers, and I thought I would share these changes with the community.

The two main changes to this programs are that we now accept three items per household per day, and we only charge $10 to recycle TVs and Monitors now (you still would receive a $10 Best Buy® gift card in once you paid this fee).

We still require the hard drive on a desktop or laptop computer to be removed before we would accept it to be recycled, but the fee we charge to remove the hard drive for you has dropped to $9.99.

This program does have slight differences from state to state, and to see the specific terms of this program for stores in your state just visit the recycling page on BestBuy.com.

Any feedback would be great!

[Allan-BBY Community Connector]

Hi Everyone,

This program is now a year old (not so new anymore as the title says), and I'm happy to announce that we recycled 60 million pounds of consumer electronics; in addition we recycled approximately 50-60 million pounds of appliances last year. This program has been a resounding success, which is awesome to hear!

I should also update everyone on more new changes to this program that I seemed to have missed in my last post. We now accept all sizes of panel TVs as part of this program (we still don't accept tube TVs 32 inches or larger), and we also now accept small electronics like fans and vacuums to be recycled in our stores.

I know in my thread on our new recycling kiosks (that are coming to our stores soon) I mentioned that one addition to these kiosks will be that they accept audio and video cable, and I am happy to inform everyone that until their local store has one of the new kiosks you can just bring your audio or video cables to the customer service desk to be recycled.

Once again I should point out that every state has different rules and regulations when it comes to recycling electronics, and to find out more specific information on our program in your state just go to the recycling page on BestBuy.com. If anyone ever has any questions or comments feel free to post back to this thread!

Thanks,

[jalbertini]

You alos don't take console TVS!

Why not?

[Allan-BBY Community Connector]

Hey Everyone,

I thought I should point out some other things that have changed in our Recycling program. Since we first launched this program we no longer charge any money to recycle any of the accepted products, and we have expanded what we accept. One example is that we now accept Hard Drives to be recycled, and for an entire list of what is accepted state by state you go to the recycling page on BestBuy.com.

Thanks,