This was kind of interesting I thought. I went into this video game store looking for a gift and for this store in particular I know they sell second hand items as well. So you always need to make sure that they aren’t selling you something used as new. To my surprise, when you looked at the shelf there didn’t seem to be any products labelled as “used” as oppose to “recycled” as you can see here:

What an interesting marketing tactic I thought to capitalize on people who want to say buy green without the negative perception that usually comes with buying used products. At the same time, I was wondering if this is borderline misleading though. Usually when I think of recycling tangible items I think of people breaking down the material to make something new out of it. Whereas in this case it is mostly repackaging the used item. For example, someone selling their used car and saying it is a recycled vehicle seems a little off. Will be interesting to see if it actually works for them and how well.

I was looking at some electronic stores today that seemed to be offering recycling program incentives where you can trade in your old products for a gift card to be used at its stores. I have yet to get rid of my old digital camera and so out of curiosity I looked up at how much credit I could get for it. Apparently, they were offering about $50 for it. That made me think as I know I could probably sell it for at least $100 minimum.

I guess it’s best to trade things in if you know the item that you have is so outdated that no one would really buy it at this age such as CRT monitors. Funny enough, sometimes you can actually buy outdated items like video games for clearance prices and then trade them in to places that will actually offer you more credit than what you paid for the item. Like in that example trading in would definitely make sense if you were looking for an instant profit with old items that may be hard to sell otherwise.

I was just cleaning up around the house and noticed that I had a pile of VHS tapes which were simply tapings of some events way back. My first inclination was to simply convert all of these to like a DVD for space sake. Afterwards I was trying to figure out if I should just dispose the old VHS tapes. I was wondering if I could sell it but who would pay for such a thing this day in age?

So at this point I might just hang on to them still as it just seems to be a bit wasteful to just throw it away. I guess the next thing to do is to see if there is even a way to say recycle this kind of stuff. Ironically, if there is it will probably cost money to do so.

I just gave away one of my old computers that is more than a decade old to a person that just wanted something simple since his old machine no longer worked. As a result, he was thinking of just bringing his old computer to a recycling center to get rid of the clutter. Here in BC you don’t get anything back financially for recycling your electronic item.

I was then just saying how maybe he can just sell it dirt cheap to someone for say $30 for some of the parts that are still usable. He then thought that was a good option and would think about it. Reminds me of that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure saying.

May as well get something out of it and at the same time I’m sure the person that would buy would make some use out of it as well.

I was noticing a lot of ads from stores recently that have been promoting Earth Day and offering discounts to people to buy more stuff. While some offers kind of made sense for the theme of the occasion such as if you trade in your old equipment you can get credit towards a new product, other deals are simply coupons to save money from purchasing X amount of dollars. It doesn’t really make sense in that case as you seem to be just adding potentially more clutter.

The one category that I thought was interesting was how electronics recycling seems to be becoming more accessible as a lot more large box stores are implementing a system to exchange your old electronic items for credit. Very similar to recycling say cans at the store for money.

For the most part though, the current ads that I see kind of play with your emotions it seems where since Earth Day is about doing something good/noble ,so to speak, attaching that phrase as a sales gimmick makes you kind of think it is a good thing to do. Should be more about learning to live as a minimalist for the day I’d say which should help you save money and live with less clutter.