It doesn’t take too many years for old computers, televisions and other electronic devices to dominate storage space in garages and attics it they aren’t thrown away.In Kansas the law allows electronic equipment to be disposed of in a landfill. In Lawrence, there’s no city ordinance preventing you from putting an old computer out with your weekly trash pick up.That isn’t environmentally sound, of course.If you care about the environment the best thing to do with old electronics is to recycle them. There are several recycling options for Lawrence residents. A complete list of electronic recycling locations can be found on the city’s waste reduction and recycling Web site.Recycling or trashing old computers raises major concerns with many people. Personal information about finances, credit cards and other subjects can still be on a computer’s hard drive. There are plenty of people out there who know how to dig out that old information and do something with it.That could be a serious problem.If you take your computer to a firm or agency for recycling and you are concerned about what might remain on your hard drive, ask if it will be completely cleaned before it is used again, said Kathy Richardson, supervisor of the city’s waste reduction and recycling staff.There are some products on the market that will erase old information by writing characters over it, according to the firms that make them. Some claim to meet U.S. Department of Defense requirements by writing over old data at least three times.”That’s probably good enough,” said John Christopher, senior data recovery specialist at DriveSavers Data Recovery, in Novato, Calif. DriveSavers is hired by companies to restore important data that supposedly has been lost in computer systems.Still, you won’t really know if the rewriting worked. You just have to hope it did, Christopher said.You could also take out the hard drive and use a hammer to destroy it, he said.”There’s all sorts of home remedies for that,” Christopher said.On Sept. 13 the city of Lawrence will hold an electronic recycling event. It will be from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the north parking lot at Free State High School, 4700 Overland Drive. Among the items accepted will be computers, monitors, televisions, copiers and others. A complete list can be found on this Web site.There will be a recycling fee of $5 per computer and $15 per television.Computers will be taken by a Topeka firm and the hard drives will be completely erased before the computer is recycled, Richardson said. If you want to pay an additional $5 the hard drive will be erased when you turn it in, she said.”You can see the hard drive washed out right in front of you,” she said.