Bring in your old printers, scanners and PCs that have been lying around at home this week to SingPost outlets. And Hewlett-Packard will take the electronic or e-waste and recycle them.

Plastics, for example, will be shredded into pellets and shipped to plastic moulders. Metals will be separated into different batches and sent to smelting plants.

HP hopes that its Recycling Week, which runs from Thursday to April 23, will raise awareness about the dangers of electronic waste.

Mr Jean Claude Vanderstraeten, HP's environmental director for Asia-Pacific and Japan, said that e-waste like plastics and metals are non-biodegradable when they are buried and when burnt, they give out noxious gases that pollute the environment.

A similar programme HP held two years ago in the North-West district in partnership with the Enterprise Promotion Board, Nokia and a couple of other companies did not yield good results.

Over four months, it collected four tons of e-waste.

In comparison, during a recycling project HP held in Sydney, Australia six months ago, it collected 40 tons of e-waste over two days.

One reason for the weak recycling culture here is the convenience of disposing old stuff.

'There are street collectors who go up to people's homes to collect old stuff like like PCs and DVD players. And people get some money for it too. So it's all very convenient.

'We hope to learn from this exercise so that we can set up a more formal structure to be able to continue with a recyling programme,' Mr Vanderstraeten added.

HP is holding this programme in line with the two-day Business for Environment conference to be held later this week. It is organised by the United Nations Environment Programme; HP is the sponsor.