As the conversion from analog to digital tv nears, many people are upgrading to standard and high definition sets and tossing out the old boxes. Televisions are ending up in landfills contributing metals like lead and mercury to runoff and soils.

Organizations like the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETC) are applying pressure to television manufacturers to establish recycling programs through which consumers can properly discard old sets instead of adding them to the trash collection bin. While this is a great first step that Panasonic and Sharp are responding to, retailers should be pressured to coordinate with manufacturers, serving as the middle man from consumer to manufacturer. This way, televisions are being recycled and possibly reused for their still operable parts sparing limited raw materials from inclusion into new televisions.

Other efforts to curb the dumping of television sets into landfills include government programs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to break the cycle of electronic waste by educating consumers about the environmental concerns related to dumping sets as well as information about local recycling locations.

Environmental leaders like William Colton of the New York State Assembly and Chair of the Committee on Solid Waste Management, are proposing taxing manufacturers similar to electronic waste taxes currently applied to computers. The computer tax has worked well to encourage manufacturers to set up recycling programs and work toward consumer awareness so that computer are not thrown away and usable parts are retrieved. Applying this same tax to all electronics-including televisions-is not an idea with static images.

Each of these effort are working and will need to be expanded at the retail level to prevent dumping sets into landfills.