In my job doing IT system administration and technical support for a Christian organisation called Bridges for Peace here in Israel, I am installing new equipment, mostly PCs and servers.
Back in April, we has an unfortunate week where three different network switches in two buildings fail suddenly, this paralysed our network access for about 25 staff, one of these switches broke the same time we had a power outage in the building I was in and the emergency power back up systems did not do the job of protecting the equipment.
What I want to know is, where is the correct place to take scrap IT equipment here in Israel?
It appears in most neighbourhoods, like mine, there are these big skips shared by three or four apartment blocks for putting in domestic rubbish in. People also put broken furniture and electrical items in. Some dead computers were left out in the hallway of my block, so I took the Pentium chips and memory out, and put them in the bin as well.
In my work, I have a pile of dead batteries from laptops, large brick batteries from UPS systems, several whole ‘shoebox’ sized UPS devices that were defective, two dead LCD panels from laptops,
All types of batteries contain highly toxic materials and LCD monitors contain small amounts of mercury. How can IT people here in Israel dispose of stuff safely, legally and responsibly here?