How to get rid of a TV in Boston

The short answer

Massachusetts keeps televisions and monitors out of the regular household trash stream. They go a separate route, and the price above is what it costs to have one collected from inside your apartment and taken down that route. The visit minimum is $75.

Why the old CRT is the hard one

Flat panels are light. A 55-inch modern TV is mostly air and one person can carry it awkwardly down a flight of stairs. The problem in Boston is the other sort: the deep glass-tube television that went into a basement or a back bedroom around 2006 and has not moved since.

Those things are heavy in a way that surprises people every time — a large CRT set can weigh as much as a washing machine and it has no useful handholds. They are also the specific reason televisions are handled separately in the first place: a cathode ray tube contains a meaningful amount of leaded glass, and it is not something you want breaking in a compactor or on a sidewalk.

Every Boston triple-decker basement seems to have one. Usually two, one on top of the other, behind the Christmas decorations.

What is actually inside a TV

Handled properly, a television is not one object but a list of them. The casing is plastic. The frame and stand are steel or aluminum. The board carries copper, and there are small amounts of the metals that make electronics worth reclaiming at all. Flat panels have backlight assemblies that need separating. Older sets have the tube.

None of that happens if the set goes in a truck compactor or sits in the rain on a Dorchester sidewalk for a week. It happens if the set goes to a processor set up for electronics, which is what the disposal portion of the price is paying for.

You do not have to do anything about this beyond not leaving it outside.

The curb, and why it goes badly here

Massachusetts restricts televisions and monitors from ordinary trash disposal, so a set left out with the household trash is generally not going to be taken. What your own municipality offers instead differs — Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline and Quincy all run their own arrangements and they change. Check your city's current page before you decide the curb is the plan.

Two specifically Boston problems with leaving one out anyway. First, rain. A TV that has sat through a wet night is finished for reuse and messier to process. Second, September. In Allston and Brighton around the first of the month, sidewalks fill with abandoned electronics, and a broken television left in that pile is an abandoned television in front of your address with nobody coming for it.

Wipe it before it leaves the apartment

A smart TV is a computer. Yours is signed into streaming accounts, it may hold a wifi password, and some of them remember payment details.

• Factory reset it while it still works. Settings, then reset to factory defaults. Thirty seconds now, impossible later.
• Sign out of the apps first if the reset option is buried or the remote has gone missing.
• Same for a computer tower at $83 — wipe the drive, or pull it out and keep it, which is the option most people prefer and the more sensible one.

If the set no longer powers on, there is nothing to do and nothing to worry about.

Getting it out of a Boston building

The carry is where the cost really sits, and it is the same story as everything else in this city.

Triple-decker back stairs. Narrow, enclosed, turning at each landing. A big CRT down three flights of those is two people and a strap.

Brownstone walk-ups in the South End and Back Bay. Four flights, no elevator, and a stoop at the bottom. Glass sets do not enjoy that journey and neither does anybody carrying one.

Seaport and downtown condos. Different problem entirely — an elevator, a service entrance, and a building that wants a certificate of insurance and a booked loading dock time before anyone moves anything. Tell us the building's requirements when you book and the paperwork goes over in advance.

Basements. Bulkhead steps, low header, and the TV is behind everything else.

No stair charge, no walk-up fee. The price is by set, not by floor.

Clearing out a whole media corner

Nobody removes one television. They remove the television, the thing it sat on, the DVD player, the speakers and the tangle of cables behind it.

A typical Boston living-room clear: a 42-to-65 inch TV, the entertainment center it stood on, a stereo and a box of the rest. That is $91 + $129 + $70 + $104 = $394.

A home-office version: a monitor, a tower and a printer. $78 + $83 + $78 = $239.

A student apartment at the end of a lease usually has a small TV, a monitor and two boxes of leftover electronics. At that point look at the quarter truck at $325 too, since the furniture is going anyway, and take whichever total is lower.

Booking it

Say the screen size, the floor, and anything else going with it. The total shows before you book. Carry-out, electronics-stream disposal and the labor are all inside it, and nothing is added at the door.

Same-day and next-day are usually available at the same price. Around September 1 and May graduation, book earlier — that is when every apartment in Allston, Brighton, Mission Hill and Somerville is emptying at once.

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