But there may be an even better option. Rather than junking your old TV, says Beatrice Sandoval of the California Integrated Waste Management Board, "You could donate it. Give it to charity, or to a friend or a relative."

Or —radical idea — how about keeping it? Sandoval is concerned that a lot of people think they have to get rid of their tube TVs because of the nationwide switch to digital broadcasting in February 2009 (see Is Your TV Already Obsolete?). "What we're trying to tell people is that if they have cable or satellite TV, they're already covered — their analog sets will continue to work just fine," she says. "And people who get an over-the-air television signal — in California, that's only 20% of all households — will be fine, too, as long as they get a converter box that'll cost them just 20 or 30 dollars."

If you've made up your mind about junking your set, and you have no Waste Management recycling center within easy driving distance, your area may be covered by a fast-growing recycling franchise called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Book them and two guys will come to your home to haul away all the detritus they can cram into their truck — it doesn't have to be e-waste. Two medium-sized CRT TVs will take up about an eighth of a truckload, which will cost roughly $100-$125 to haul off (prices vary by area). With the pending switch to digital broadcasting, Andrea Bava, the company's community relations manager, expects a lot more old TVs to be discarded — and she adds that the company doesn't mind two-fers. "If two neighbors each want to have a TV set hauled away, most of our franchisees will work with them," she says.

But the fears of many who believed there'd be a veritable flood of CRTs ending up in the waste stream may be overblown. Tim Herbert, senior director of market research for the Consumer Electronics Association, believes it will be "a protracted process rather than a spike, similar to what occurred when people began switching from portable cassette players to iPods." His organization did a recent study that bore out that prediction: Over the next 2 1/2 years, households that receive over-the-air TV are expected to discard fewer than 15 million analog sets — a sizeable number but hardly alarming. Then again, Herbert also found that 42% of respondents didn't know how or where to recycle their TV sets.

Sony director of corporate environmental affairs, Douglas Smith, is pleased with his own company's industry-leading recycling initiative, but he acknowledges there's still work to do. "The silver bullet is to get the collection centers near the retailers," he says. "Not necessarily to have the collection centers inside the stores, but somewhere close in the neighborhood. We have to get to a situation where recycling a TV is as easy as purchasing one."

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