HP Wants To Buy Back Your Tech Gear

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Kudos to Hewlett-Packard! HP has just a year left to fulfill its pledge to recycle a staggering two billion tons of electronic equipment. (Let's do the math: two billion times 2000 pounds = Ouch! That hurts my head to count that high!).

It's a great pledge. One problem; where do you get all that old geek gear to recycle? The company's solution is to buy it - from you. HP has had this sort of trade-in program for years buying back your gear and putting it towards your next HP purchase. But this is even better! Now HP will just buy your old gear and send you a check (deducting shipping charges, of course).

There's an online calculator on the HP site where you can plug in the make and model of your gear; even upgrades, and it will calculate its buy back value.

I plugged in the specs on my laptop and discovered I could get about $60. Taking into consideration a new HP notebook can go for as little as $500 - $600, that's a 10%+ discount if I did take in the trade-in. Not bad!

And all for a good cause! That's two billion tons of gear that won't spend the next 50,000 years sloooooooooowwwly decaying in a landfill.

Word is that HP, so far, is about half way to its goal. This beats paying Staples $10 to take your old gear off your hands for recycling.

Regretfully, there is no buyback program to recycle old ink cartridges.

Just a suggestion, HP.

Renee Oricchio

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio