Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones and some new branding. Felt cute, might delete later. If you have design opinions, hit reply.

In other updates, it’s officially bike month all over the country. If you’re in Charlottesville, block off your calendar because every day there’s another fun event, and another opp to flex your calves. Plus, check out the new “quiet routes” throughout the city. 

And finally, if you missed last week, get the scoop on sustainable dental care before the rest of us pop Now That's What I Call Music! 2 into our Sony discman with anti-skip protection and turn the volume on high.

Last week, I plugged in my hair dryer, pressed Medium Heat, and expected to get on with my morning. Instead, I heard a big POW! and spent the next half hour running the bathroom fan to get rid of the smell of burning hair. 

This isn’t really a whole Hot Bones story, just something that happened last week that was mildly inconvenient (mainly because now I have to share a hairdryer with G and she’s way neater than I am). I also now had another thing on my to-do list: how to get rid of a busted hair dryer without chucking it in the trash.

It sat on my nightstand for three days before I got around to googling solutions. And then of course it took me 5 seconds to find an answer: Hair dryers are considered “e-waste” (loosely defined as anything with a plug or battery). This means that a) your local recycling center might accept them but also b) Best Buy definitely will.

In fact, Best Buy will recycle a ton of your e-waste, all for free. As will your local Staples. Staples will even give you rewards points back. 

This is pretty cool because e-waste is a huge issue, with the average American tossing out 47 lbs of e-waste every year. (Would be willing to bet that 45 of those pounds are now-totally-useless non-Lightning Port devices.)

Not only is this a waste of materials that could be used for producing other devices, but also once tech trash ends up in landfills, toxic materials like lead and mercury can seep into the soil and groundwater.

My suspicion about why there’s so much e-waste is that people like me just honestly don’t know where’s the right place to throw it away. A vague sense of guilt keeps dead hair dryers on nightstands, dead batteries in junk drawers, and an entire box of dead cables and cords in closets nationwide. And then one day we’re finally fed up with it, and we put everything in the kitchen trash to get it out of sight and out of mind. 

Having a free, convenient recycling solution to e-waste — and by multiple leading for-profit companies — feels pretty rare. 

So this past week, I went to Best Buy to drop off my busted hair dryer. Then I went to Staples to do a little comparison, and throw away a bunch of now-obsolete chargers.

This trip took two minutes so it also isn’t a full HB story. We parked right out front, and walked inside with the tote bag full of hair dryer + cables + old hard drive.

I said, “where can I recycle these tech items?” to the guy at the entrance, and he said “right here.”

I handed over my stuff, the man put green “recycle” stickers on them, and then we were all set. Honestly the longest part of the trip was getting roasted for bringing in a hard drive so antiquated every Gen Zer working up front thought it was a massive first-gen internet router.

We left with an empty tote bag. Too bad Best Buy doesn’t sell new hair dryers.

Quick FYI that Best Buy also now has a mail-in option, which has helped it collect a total of more than 2.7 billion pounds of e-waste and appliances since the overall program started in 2009. What happens to the e-waste after you drop it off and skip away? See here.

Not having any hair dryers or cables left to recycle now, I had to scour the house for anything tech adjacent to get rid of. 

It’s a funny problem to have because last year before we moved, we were swimming in old tech that had been transported dutifully at the bottom of boxes from one apartment to the next, the rat king growing ever more gnarly and USB-C oriented as our 20s flew by.

But when we were packing to move to Cville, I think G and I realized just through the sheer volume of cardboard boxes labeled “OLD TECH” that enough was enough. And in a panic before the movers arrived we — I’m sorry to say — threw a bunch of stuff straight in the trash. 

So now we have a very streamlined single tech box, and I had like five pens to bring to Staples.

The last place I looked in our house was an old trunk full of crap from grad school. Thankfully, below piles of academic throat-clearing (The Professor’s House and the Professors Houses: An Inquiry), I had squirreled away a bunch of old Apple chargers and a pair of headphones with cords.

When I got to Staples, it was the same deal: less than 2 minutes in and out. Bliss.

Plus, when I made a Staples account (name, email, phone), I was rewarded for all the things I brought in to recycle. I am good ✨

I got an email about it after I left: “You’ve earned 1500 points.”

Translation: $7.50 off my next purchase. Three-ring binders are on me tonight, folks! 

Highly recommend taking a look at the Best Buy and Staples recycling pages to visualize all the e-crap around your house that’s easily recyclable. The lists are slightly different (Staples doesn’t accept hair dryers, for example), but either way, you’re getting the satisfaction of a clean junk drawer without the guilt of throwing batteries in the trash.

(And if you’re looking for a long-read, earlier this year The Cool Down interviewed Staples’ VP of Merch about their recycling + rewards program, which includes turning old printer ink into roads in California.)

And if you need some inspiration about what e-waste to recycle first, here are some ideas.

If you grew up in the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” era, try recycling …

If you grew up in the Walkman era, try recycling …

If you grew up in the Sputnik era

For anyone who travels

For anyone who went to middle school

For anyone who thinks tea isn’t strong enough

For anyone who has a junk drawer

If you end up recycling any e-waste this week, shoot me an email and I’ll highlight it in the next edition! 

Thanks for reading this week’s Hot Bones. If you’ve got thoughts, hit reply. I’d love to hear from you.

🦴 Charlotte