TV and electronics disposal in Jacksonville

The short answer

Those prices include carrying it out and handling the disposal through the appropriate stream. There is no e-waste surcharge. Minimum $75 per visit, so a single small TV at $62 will bill the $75 minimum - worth bundling the monitor and the box of cables while the truck is there.

Why Jacksonville produces so much dead electronics

Four regional forces, and they are not subtle:

• Lightning. Florida gets more thunderstorm days than anywhere else in the country, and Northeast Florida sits squarely in that pattern from roughly June into September. A near strike does not have to hit the house - it induces a surge on the line and takes out televisions, routers, garage door openers, pool pumps and irrigation controllers.
• Restoration surges. After a storm outage, the moment power comes back is its own hazard. A lot of the equipment we haul after a named storm survived the wind fine and died when the grid came back up.
• Salt air. At Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach, anything with an exposed board or connector corrodes faster. Outdoor speakers, patio TVs and cameras have short lives near the ocean.
• Humidity. Electronics stored in a garage, carport or unconditioned Florida room are not really in storage. They are in a slow bath.

Which is why so many Jacksonville garages contain a stack of dead screens that nobody has quite dealt with.

Why the TV cannot just go at the curb

Electronics are generally handled differently from household waste, and televisions and monitors are the strictest category because of the heavy metals in older display technology. Municipal programs commonly exclude them from the regular stream or require them to be set out separately.

Check your city's current guidance on electronics and household hazardous waste before you put a screen out, rather than assuming your bulky-item day covers it. A TV left at the swale and refused sits there until somebody deals with it - and in a Jacksonville summer that means it sits there getting rained on, which is how a glass CRT ends up cracked open in a front garden.

Retailer take-back and recycling drop-offs

If you want the free route first, there are two worth trying.

Retailer take-back. Several national electronics chains run in-store recycling for small electronics, and some will take a television with conditions - size limits are common, and fees on large or older sets are common too. Check the current policy with the specific store before you load it into the car, because these change often.

Collection events and permanent drop-offs. Duval runs facilities intended for exactly this sort of material. Check the city's current locations, hours and accepted-item list. Two practical Jacksonville notes: the drop-offs are not close to everybody in a county this size, so factor the drive, and a 65-inch set does not fit in a sedan.

If either of those works for you, take it. If you are looking at an old rear-projection set in the Florida room and a car that will not hold it, that is what the $73 is for.

CRTs and rear-projection sets

Jacksonville garages and Florida rooms are still full of two specific relics:

• Glass CRT televisions, the deep boxy ones. Heavy, awkward, and the category most likely to be refused by a general recycler. They are also genuinely worth not breaking - the glass is the reason for the handling rules.
• Rear-projection big screens, the enormous cabinets from the early 2000s that live in family rooms across Arlington, Lakewood and Mandarin. These are two-person lifts, often over 200 pounds, and they do not come apart helpfully.

Both are priced by screen size like anything else - $62, $68 or $73 - and both are carried out rather than dragged. If a rear-projection set is going down a flight of stairs, tell us when you book so we plan the route, not because it changes the price.

Wipe your data first

Do this before we arrive, because once the truck leaves it is gone.

• Sign the smart TV out of every streaming account and factory reset it. A modern set holds live logins.
• Pull and keep the drive from any desktop or laptop, or run a full factory wipe.
• Check printers and copiers - office machines frequently have storage in them holding scanned documents.
• Empty network gear of saved passwords, and remember the router knows your Wi-Fi.

This matters more than people think in a market with a large military and defense-contractor population. If in doubt, keep the drive and let us take the chassis.

Worked totals

The media wall. TV 42 to 65 inch $68, entertainment center $96, box of electronics $77. $68 + $96 + $77 = $241 - which happens to be exactly the quarter-truck price, so take whichever is easier to book.

The home office. Computer monitor $58, standard desk $83, office chair $61. $58 + $83 + $61 = $202.

Post-storm surge damage. A 65-inch set $73 plus a box of dead electronics $77. $73 + $77 = $150.

Two old sets from the garage. $62 + $68 = $130.

If your list runs longer, compare against the ladder: $241 for a quarter truck, $338 for 3/8, $431 for a half.

Booking it

Tell us the screen sizes and roughly how many boxes of small electronics there are. That is enough to price it. Photos help if a rear-projection cabinet is involved or if the set is upstairs, though there is no stair charge either way.

The busiest two weeks for this in Jacksonville is always the one after a storm passes through. If that is when you are reading this, book early in the week - the schedule fills from the weekend backwards.

Frequently asked questions