DEL.ICIO.USAtlantans recycle old electronics for free
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Cedric Brown finally parted with a trusted friend Saturday — his first computer.
It was an IBM XT, with two floppy drives, and he ran Lotus 1-2-3 on it way back in 1985, managing spreadsheets for a lighting company.
Bo Emerson / bemerson@ajc.com
Waste Management employees and volunteers loaded up computer monitors, televisions, and even a pinball machine Saturday during a free electronic recycling event. Here, Fernando Ramos and Angel-Luis Nieves check out recycled computer monitors.
Saturday afternoon, Brown handed the archaic device over to a worker in the Green Lot at Turner Field, who tossed it onto a stack of PCs where it was shrink-wrapped and loaded into a semi-trailer.
After his machine ceased functioning, Brown said, it gathered dust in the basement as a reminder of his computing beginnings. “I just couldn’t being myself to part with this particular computer until now.”
Dozens of trailers stood by as men driving forklifts loaded them up with pallets of computer monitors, printers, console televisions and even a rather attractive “Fireball” pinball machine.
Organized by Sony and Waste Management, the one-day electronics recycling program retrieved about 230,000 pounds of abandoned gizmos that would have otherwise been bound for the garbage heap.
Electronics frequently harbor toxic metals and other pollutants that can threaten waterways and human health for years. TV monitors can contain up to eight pounds of lead, and many batteries include cadmium, said Chad Miller, of Houston-based Waste Management.
While consumers usually have to pay a fee to dispose of such items, Sony covered the cost of Saturday’s recycling, all of which will be re-processed by Marietta recycler MOLAM International Inc.
At that facility, event organizers said, the equipment will be broken into its component parts, and reused or disposed of with strict adherence to environmental protection.
The goal of Saturday’s collection was to emphasize responsible electronics recycling.
“We hope by holding events like this, that the message gets out,” Robert Benavent, an environmental engineer with Sony Electronics, said as he watched a line of cars and pickup trucks snake through the collection site.
This is Sony’s first national campaign to promote e-cycling, and it has yielded about 11 million pounds of electronics, nationwide, Benavent said. “We hope to have permanent drop-off sites within 20 miles of 95 percent of the population,” he said.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 82 percent of the 2.25 million tons of old TVs, cell phones and computers discarded in the last two years ended up in landfills.
Then again, plenty stayed in basements and attics, judging from the towering stack of beige plastic and matte-black metal being retrieved from Saturday’s caravan.
Ronda Rattray, of Chastain Park, formerly with IBM, took advantage of the free collection to unload a couple of obsolete computer towers and a quintessential ’80s artifact, a LaserDisc player. “I just couldn’t see putting that in a landfill,” she said.
The event was greeted cheerfully by most of those driving through. They congratulated the approximately 100 workers for helping ease the problem of electronic waste.
Some participants, though, couldn’t help but see a melancholy message in the stacks of discarded stereo equipment and VCRs — an indictment of America the Wasteful.
“I saw a new computer, in the box, with the stickers still on it,” said Forrest Springfield, a worker at the event, as he shrink-wrapped a stack of monitors.
Some people were tempted.
Carlos Romero, who rode in from Conyers on his motorcycle with a box of ABS plastic to contribute, asked if there any motherboards he could take home.
But Waste Management’s Miller said event organizers committed to disposing of the material; they can’t let anything return to the market, where it might not be re-processed in an environmentally sound fashion.
Brown, 51, has participated in other electronics recycling events and has unloaded other PCs before. But he hung onto his Ur-computer. Before it stopped working, he let his three daughters play on it.
“It’s the first one they banged on, and as a result, they were never intimidated by computers” and became more at ease with science and engineering, Brown said.
Two daughters are now students at Georgia Tech.
“See,” he said. “It worked!”
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