In an effort to recycle responsibly, New York has passed a law that will take affect in 2015 that will make it illegal to just throw away your old or broken gadgets. A new e-wast ban goes into affect in the new year making it illegal to put your cracked iphone or broken tv in the garbage. If you are caught doing it you can get fined $100 per item.

There are 20 other states with similar disposal or landfill bans for electronics. Each states list of gadgets is different, but for the most part it includes anything with a circuit board that becomes unusable. The strictest regulations are in California. There they consider e-waste just as bad as hazardous waste.

If you don’t want to be fined, there are plenty of ways to disgard your old electronics. You can drop your items off at Best Buy or mail them back to the manufacturers. There are also drop-off centers in most major cities.

In New York, for instance, you can bring your old gadgets to the Lower East Side Ecology Center. In California, many campuses offer electronic drop-offs, including Stanford.

Laws like the New York will incentivize people to not dispose of their old gadgets the easy and bad way by dangling a punishment, but that’s only half the solution. It’s important that manufacturers actively work to make choosing the ecologically friendly option more appealing than risking a fine, and that the rest of the country steps up to the plate in the meantime.

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