It’s that time of year again—out with the old and in with the new cell phones, MP3 players, laptops, and TVs that were nicely wrapped and placed in the holiday gift pile.

Now that the new gadgets have been sufficiently warmed up, it’s time to figure out what to do with the old ones. And technology and electronics companies want consumers to think twice before tossing them to the curb along with the crumpled wrapping paper. If they can’t be donated for reuse, then it’s time to find a way to recycle them.

In many ways, electronics recycling is still a problem with no easy solution. Recycling is a costly process, which is why most companies haven’t made the effort easy for consumers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that unwanted electronics amounted to approximately 1.9 million to 2.2 million tons in 2005. Of that total, about 1.5 million to 1.9 million tons were primarily discarded in landfills and only 345,000 to 379,000 tons were recycled.

But as the green movement has spread, tech companies have realized that they can no longer ignore the problem. In 2005, for instance, Hewlett-Packard had $6 billion in requests for proposals from potential customers that mandated environmental or social criteria.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how much of a dent recycling makes in companies’ bottom lines. When asked, Dell, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and Xerox all declined to provide specific dollar amounts spent on recycling efforts, but they clearly want the public to know that they are doing it. They were similarly reluctant to divulge how much money, labor, or time is put into processes such as making packaging more environmentally friendly.

It’s easy to see how quickly the costs mount. There are logistical and labor costs for equipment pickup and costs associated with disassembling products in search of reusable and recyclable parts. Desktop PCs are made mostly of metal and steel, which are relatively inexpensive to recycle because their value can help offset processing costs. But a photocopier, which is made mostly of plastic and one small circuit board, has many more costs associated with the recycling process.

“It’s like making an investment in any other parts of the business,” said Patty Calkins, vice president for environment health and safety at Xerox. “We may have to put a little bit more cost into the product to enable remanufacturing...[but] we get far more payback than we end up having to invest.”

Not only are computer monitors, circuit boards, cell phones, and other electronics gadgets sources of toxic waste, they’re also sources of valued commodities like copper, steel, nickel, and even gold.

Some companies say recovering large amounts of those metals could help offset recycling costs. A single computer contains only a fraction of an ounce of gold, but in an average shipping unit of H-P computer equipment, there might be eight or 12 ounces of gold. On a day when gold closes at $680 an ounce, that’s $3,600 worth of gold in one box. 

"Certainly, it’s a reasonable chunk of how you offset the costs,” says Renee St. Denis, the director of product recycling for H-P’s Americas unit. “The thing to remember is, different products are going to contain different amounts of gold and silver and platinum and palladium, which are the main metals you would be going after.”

There are other ways that companies can minimize the costs of being green: encouraging reuse of items like toner cartridges and waste toner; manufacturing products with fewer materials and parts so less labor and energy is required; and making products with more reusable materials that can have second or third lives.

Xerox says reusing parts generates “several hundred million dollars” in savings each year and that in 2005, reuse conserved enough energy to light more than 220,000 homes for a year.

Still, it’s not exactly easy for consumers to recycle their electronics, which is why so many old stereos and computer monitors end up collecting dust in storage spaces.

Sony offers free electronics recycling at 75 drop-off centers run by Waste Management. Non-Sony products can also be recycled but may incur a fee. “One of the problems in recycling has been the economic sustainability of these programs, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do—to develop them,” says Waste Management spokesman Wes Muir.

Most computer manufacturers will recycle old laptops and PCs for free with the purchase of new ones. Only Dell will recycle for free without a purchase. Smaller devices like phones and MP3 players can usually be mailed to their manufacturers for recycling at no expense to the consumer.

Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition, said it’s up to companies to figure out cost-effective ways to recycle and include them in overall product costs. Some haven’t gotten there yet.

“It should be easy to recycle your product,” Davis said. “You should not have to package it up or mail it off or wait for some special day to actually recycle it.”

Of course, recycling still has its chorus of skeptics. Martin Reynolds, vice president of emerging trends and technologies at Gartner, an internet-technology research and advisory company, says recycling is simply not profitable, even with the fees that many companies charge for picking products up from consumers. Moreover, he says, consumers don’t care enough about the environment for companies’ efforts to pay off in the marketplace.

Last May, Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs acknowledged that his company had not been forthright about its environmental policy, promising a greener Apple. “Apple took a black eye for being a very environmentally unfriendly company,” Reynolds said, “but consumers cried, ‘We don’t care. Give us our iPods.’”