Over at cbc.ca/technology, Scott Valentine has a nice piece called Ctrl-Alt-Reduce:
Canada is well behind places such as the EU when it comes to e-waste management. There’s no compelling regulation in Canada that penalizes manufacturers and distributors of e-waste for failing to adopt a cradle-to-grave management strategy for their products, and little incentive provided to private entrepreneurs who want to make a living out of recycling your old computer parts.
Have you recycled e-waste? Would you if you could?
Original photo by Martin Kingsley.
Back at the end of January as part of sustainability initiatives at OCAD, we hosted a “Green Exchange” event where we invited our community members to bring in outdated technology for proper recycling or exchange with other community members who were looking for items. This included computers and peripherals (keyboards, mice, cables, printers, monitors, etc.), old cell phones, and batteries. Computers and peripherals were recycled by Toronto Recycling Incorporated and batteries were recycled by The Battery Broker Environmental Services Inc.
It was a very successful event and our Sustainability Task Force is looking forward to holding it again in the future.
You guys may want to talk to someone (Ifny?) at FreeGeek (http://freegeekvancouver.org) – they do ethical computer recycling, re-building and free training for open source technologies. Volunteer 25 hours in the shop and you get a free computer that you build yourself!
I feel embarassed to say this, but I can’t really afford to recycle properly. I had some old terminals and a broken TV that I brought to Computer Recyclers http://www.computerrecyclersottawa.com/ which they then weighed and told me how much it would cost to recycle. Turns out it was more than it cost me to buy them in the first place.
They are currently sitting in my bacement under the hope that a cheaper way to recycle will become available. It just seems wrong to bring it all to the dump.
Russell, I feel your pain. A few years ago I had to pay a dollar per pound to get rid of 3 monitors. $100 later, I didn’t feel so eco-friendly.
As someone who’s sitting on four skids of dead computers, I’d love to hear of somewhere in Ontario I can send this stuff without a large fee.
Since there’s no reason I can’t pitch it in the dumpster, I can’t convince the boss to pay for disposal….
Note to Russell McOrmond: Waste Management is holding a free e-cycle event at the Ottawa landfill on Carp Road Saturday, April 26 from 9:00-1:00. He can bring just about any e-waste (but not TVs) there and it will be recycled free of charge.
Disclosure: Waste Management is a client.
Bob LeDrew,
Thanks for sending the email as well as posting here. I ended up contacting Waste Management to get some more details.
I’m one of those odd people who doesn’t own a car, and my wife doesn’t drive outside the city. The WM facility is outside Stittsville, so we won’t be able to bring some of our stuff this weekend. We also have a broken TV and two broken Microwaves, and they don’t take either.
I just got off the phone with Jody from WM who responded to the feedback form. They do their special eWaste event twice yearly. Likely I will try to organize something with other techie friends in the same situation for the fall.
Jody also pointed me to the City of Ottawa’s Take it Back site http://www.ottawa.ca/takeitback/ which lists a number of different companies that do recycling, beyond the ones I already knew about.
CanadaGeeks is a member of the Free Geek ‘family’ in Toronto. We’ll gladly accept non-working computers – we refurbish them or recycle them depending on their condition. If we refurbish them, they go out to people who otherwise couldn’t afford a computer. Just drop us a line using our website.