TV and electronics disposal in Baltimore

The short answer

Visit minimum $75, so a single monitor at $58 or one small TV at $62 is a $75 visit. Add anything else and you pay the item prices.

Carry-out and responsible recycling are included. There is no e-waste surcharge.

You cannot just put a TV out

Electronics are handled differently from household trash across Maryland, and TVs and monitors are the strictest category because of what is inside them. Do not assume a television goes out with the rest of the bulk. Check your city or county's current electronics recycling rules and drop-off options before you plan around them, and note that Baltimore City and Baltimore County run separate programs, so Towson, Catonsville and Pikesville follow different instructions from a Canton rowhouse three miles away.

The practical upshot is that a TV set on the curb or in the alley behind your rowhome is likely to sit there. Alley scrappers who will happily take a steel dryer generally leave televisions alone, because there is no easy money in them. So it stays, and it becomes your neighbor's problem and then eventually yours again.

The CRT in the basement

There is one in a remarkable number of Baltimore rowhouse cellars: a tube television from before the flat-screen era, forty to two hundred pounds, sitting on the floor next to the furnace since roughly 2009.

Two things about it. It contains leaded glass, which is precisely why the rules exist and why it cannot go in the trash. And it is genuinely heavy in a way nobody expects, in a dug-out cellar with narrow stairs and low pipes overhead. That is a two-person carry with straps.

It is still $62 if it is under 42 inches, which nearly every CRT is. There is no weight surcharge and no stair charge.

Wipe the drives first

Do this before the crew arrives, because afterwards is too late.

• Computers and laptops. Sign out of accounts, then factory reset or physically remove and keep the drive.
• Smart TVs. Factory reset. Yours is signed into streaming accounts and, on many sets, a saved wifi password.
• Printers. Office copiers and many home multifunction units store scanned documents. Reset them.
• Phones and tablets. Reset and remove the SIM.
• Old external drives. If you cannot wipe it, keep it and destroy it yourself.

A box of electronics is $77, and that box usually contains three devices with your data on them.

Real Baltimore jobs

Living room upgrade in Hampden. Old TV between 42 and 65 inches plus the entertainment center it sat on: $68 + $96 = $164.

Cellar clear-out in Highlandtown. CRT television, computer monitor and a box of electronics: $62 + $58 + $77 = $197.

Home office broken down in Roland Park. Desk, office chair, monitor and a box of electronics: $83 + $61 + $58 + $77 = $279.

Small office on a Mount Vernon floor. Commercial copier, two monitors and a cubicle workstation: $97 + $58 + $58 + $163 = $376.

Donation, and when it is realistic

Working laptops and recent monitors do find homes. Several Baltimore-area nonprofits refurbish equipment for community programs, and a five-year-old working laptop is genuinely useful to somebody.

What does not get taken anywhere: CRT televisions, plasma sets, anything with a cracked panel, and printers of any age. Do not spend a week trying to donate a tube TV. Nobody in this metro wants it, and that is not a judgment, it is just the market.

Anything reusable we route to reuse. The rest goes to electronics recycling, which is inside the price.

Offices and small commercial

Small-office clear-outs downtown and in Mount Vernon come with their own list. A cubicle or office workstation is $163, a conference table is $260, an executive solid wood desk is $208, and a commercial copier is $97.

If you are on a floor in an older downtown building, check the freight elevator situation and whether the loading dock has restricted hours before you pick a window. That constraint is almost always tighter than ours.

Booking it

Pick the screens and boxes, see the total, pick a window. Tell us if the TV is in a cellar and whether it is a tube set, so the crew brings the right number of people. Price does not change either way.

Frequently asked questions