Can or should a microwave be disposed with the normal trash, what if any are the environmental impacts of the magnetron or other parts sitting in a landfill? — DNR
I figure that some day, we’ll turn to our landfills as resources for precious elements like copper and gold. That assumes, of course, that we survive global warming. In the meantime, we’ll just keep throwing stuff out.
Despite the scary title “microwave radiation,” a microwave oven is basically just another household electronic device. It is an extremely close relative of a convention cathode-ray-tube television set. If you’re OK with putting CRT televisions and computer monitors in the landfill, you should have no problems with putting microwave ovens there, too. Even when the microwave oven is on, all it has inside it is microwave radiation and that’s just not a big deal. The instant you turn it off, it doesn’t even have those microwaves in it. It’s just boring inert electronic parts and they’ll sit in the landfill for generations, rusting and decaying like every other abandoned electronic gadget. I’d rather see it go to a recycling center and have its precious materials returned to the resource bin, but as landfill junk goes, it’s not all that bad. Given that toxic chemicals are the primary concern with landfills, microwave ovens are probably rather innocuous. They have no radioactive contents and although the high-voltage capacitor might have oil in it, that oil can no longer be the toxic PCBs that were common a few decades ago. Even when that oil leaks into the environment, it’s probably not going to do much.
So there you have it, microwave ovens go to their graves no more loudly or dangerously than old televisions or computers or cell phones.
In fact, I might start calling cell phones “microwave phones” because that’s exactly what they are. They communicate with the base unit by way of microwave radiation. Given the number of people who have cell phones semi-permanently installed in their ears, concerns about microwave radiation should probably be redirect from microwave ovens to “microwave phones.” Think about it next time your six-year-old talks for an hour with her best friend on that “microwave phone.”