A customer brought an impressively old, tube-style TV into the Best Buy store in West Mifflin not long ago, taking advantage of the chain's year-old program to recycle consumer electronics. As soon as employees moved the TV to the backroom storage area, "It fell apart," recalled sales operator Ginny Nelson.

Taking care of the previously loved stuff is becoming part of retail service these days. Stores aren't just sending goods out into the world. They're adding programs to take back merchandise, or maybe the bags it was carried out in, and dispose of the materials responsibly. If that helps spur more sales, well, great.

Since Best Buy took its expanded consumer electronics recycling program national a year ago, the Minnesota company estimates it has accepted more than 1 million items weighing about 60 million pounds. In the 20 or so stores that make up the Pittsburgh district alone, people brought in more than 30,000 items estimated to weigh more than 1 million pounds.

Many of those bringing in old computers and TVs stick around to buy something else. "Stores are using that to drive the volume to our stores," said Chris Boik, senior manager of environmental affairs for Best Buy. Partly because of that, the company is getting closer to its goal of breaking even on the program, Mr. Boik said.

Retailers, hesitant for years to go full bore into expensive sustainability projects, have come to the point where they believe the payoff -- both with consumers and on a strict accounting basis -- adds up. Environmentally sensitive strategies are infiltrating every cornershelf and checkout counter of mainstream retail.

It would be impossible to include all the examples but here's a few.

• Eat'n Park is building a LEED-certified restaurant at the Waterworks mall.

• Giant Eagle supermarkets collect fat and bone trimmings for recycling, and the grocer is retrofitting glass doors on frozen food cases to save energy.

• Wal-Mart is experimenting in a few California stores with eliminating free plastic bags.

• American Eagle Outfitters has an internal "green team" to look at issues such as increasing recycling and finding ways to reduce energy use.

• The Chipotle restaurant chain has a new energy-efficient prototype.

• Office Depot announced last month it would try to meet tough energy and environmental design standards for store interiors, starting this June.

• Kohl's claims to be the first retailer to commit to reach net zero U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2010.

"It's really started to gain momentum in the past three years," said Dan Butler, vice president of retail operations with the National Retail Federation, a trade group based in Washington, D.C.

There have been eco-focused retailers for much longer, with chains such as REI, or Recreational Equipment Inc., and niche players like Equita in Lawrenceville and E House on the South Side, looking at various issues from product choices to construction issues.

Construction Junction, in the East End, has been recycling building materials, while cell phone recycling programs can be found in more than one place.

It often takes passionate first-adopters to get things started.

But some observers point to the biggest players in the industry as a factor in making the business case for more mainstream players to take the issues seriously. "Clearly Wal-Mart, for example, is teaching a lot of us lessons on how sustainability doesn't have to cost more," said James Dion, president of Dionco Inc., a retail consulting firm in Chicago.

In recent years, Wal-Mart pushed its suppliers to reduce packaging materials, such as that used for liquid laundry detergent. By next year, the chain estimates that move will save more than 125 million pounds of cardboard, 80 million pounds of plastic resin and 430 million gallons of water. The company also claims it made its U.S. truck fleet 38 percent more efficient by installing fuel-saving technology, loading better and improving routing.

Not everyone has the big discounter's resources but even small retailers can learn from the projects taken on by larger operations, said Mr. Butler.

A few months ago, the National Retail Federation launched a retail industry sustainability scorecard that any of its members can use to do an internal assessment. It asks questions on everything from the lifecycle of products used for in-store marketing to the use of temperature regulating controls and fuel efficient vehicles.

Even before the scorecard was discussed at a retail conference in January, between 50 and 60 federation members had tried it out, said Mr. Dion, who is working on the project with the federation and Will Ander, a senior partner at consulting firm McMillan/Doolittle and co-author of the 2008 book, "Greentailing and Other Revolutions in Retail."

The hope is that more companies will try the scorecard, get ideas about things they can do and then come back to update their score regularly as things progress. Results are private, although the goal is to cull trend information after enough companies have participated.

There are so many different aspects to sustainability that every company is setting different priorities. Swedish furniture retailer Ikea put out a statement in January after the Copenhagen Climate Change talks that noted there's always something more that can be done, saying it had embraced sustainability as a "never ending job and a never ending list."

For now, Best Buy is still tinkering with its expanded recycling project. The retailer notes in its website explanation of the program that "consumer electronics are the fastest growing waste stream on the planet." Although the company doesn't say so, that fact would seem to have the potential to make future customers less enamoured of the latest gadgets.

The program's rules only allow certain returns. For example, households have been limited to two electronics items daily, although that was expected to be increased in March; consumers need to take the hard drive out of computers, or pay the store to do it; and there's a $10 fee for pieces with leaded glass such as computer monitors and some TVs, although the customer service desk then hands the individual at $10 store gift card.

People aren't allowed to walk into the store with really big TVs. They have to pay a fee to get those picked up. There's also a separate program for large appliances.

Ms. Nelson, at the West Mifflin store, said people seem to get a good feeling when they drop off something that they didn't need anymore but weren't sure what to do with. "It makes them feel like they've done a good clean-up job."

And the staff at stores around the country get to check out the things that previous salespeople sold as the latest and greatest technology. Mr. Boik described seeing old mobile phones, console TVs, even an old karoke microphone from Japan. "This stuff should be in a museum, sometimes."

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