IF IT'S TO REDUCE, AND NOT REUSE, HOW ABOUT RECYCLE?

"About 100 slot machines seized in the raids sit in a brick warehouse. Roughly 500 others were sold to a company that paid the county $100,000. Mr. (Cameron County District Attorney Luis) Saenz said environmental regulations prohibited him from destroying confiscated eight-liners.
'I wanted to steamroll them to send a message,'” he said.

New York Times, March 31, By Manny Fernandez

By Juan Montoya
As Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz tells it, he would have dearly loved to have steamrolled eight-liner gambling machines he had confiscated, but, being the Green Guy he is, he had to sell them.
Only after he had been prodded and bloggers cajoled him to turn over the information on their sale – which he promised he would never do a la Armando Villalobos – did he finally disclose that he had made a lump of, ahem, green out of them.
Actually, about $100,000 so far, with the DA's cut of other sales yet to come.
And why couldn't they be destroyed?
According to the DA's Spin Machine extraordinaire, the tree huggers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (or was it the Texas Water Quality Control Board), said smashing them at the landfill was a no-no and that dispoosing of them would have been economically prohibitive.
Everyone (including, apparently, the NYT) bought that line for a while.
But we have shown that the City of Brownsville conducts recycling efforts periodically collecting the identical electronic motherboards and electronic parts for nothing. And just a few days ago we listed the website of Republic http://www.republicservices.com/communities/municipalities
Services, which specilaizes in environment-friendly disposal of the very parts the DA or his crackerjack minions couldn't find.
Of course, paying someone to dispose of them wouldn't leave $100,000 in cold hard cash in his Forfeiture Fund from which he selectively pays his favorites over at the DA's Office. But since he says he hasn't touched one red penny of that sale, why not use it to dispose of the eight-liners he now confiscates and has in storage?
We are not waging folks here (we don't have the money, really), but we would bet that it won;t take nowhere near $100,000 to have Republic Services take them off the DA's green hands.
In fact, we can prove that the company handles the specific electronic waste that is beguiling Luis and his ecologically-challenged team over on Harrison Street.
Take a gander at the list of items that are handled by Republic.

Notice right at the bottom of the list (we cropped it for your convenience) that there are "gambling" equipment and video games and accessories listed as items they recycle. (click on graphic to enlarge)
Obviously, someone didn't do their due diligence for Luis on this one. But as we said before, recycling and being Green doesn't leave any greenbacks in the DA's Office budget. Making people (and the New York Times) believe that they're reluctantly raking in the bucks while wringing their hands because they couldn't be eco-friendly does.