By Sue Moore
“What’s in your deep storage unit in the way of electronics?”
If you have been hiding those old ‘boat anchors’ of computers, screens, TVs and other oddball items, you now have a place to get rid of them….for free! Schoolcraft Township and the other area municipalities have joined together to support a free electronics recycling event on Saturday, October 5 from 9 a.m. to noon at the township hall.
Residents are encouraged to dig into their garage, basement and other storage areas to ferret out as many old computers, cell phones, monitors, printers, keyboards, cords, cables, modems, DVD and VCR players that they can find, according to Don Ulsh, Schoolcraft Township supervisor. He is enthusiastic about the potential to recycle and has offered the parking lot of the township building at 50 East VW Ave., to Emerald eCycling as a central location in South Kalamazoo County.
Other items that might be taking up shelf space and eligible for recycling include MP3 players, gaming consoles, CD players, radios, stereos, microwaves, calculators, flat screen TVs, remote controls, UPS, test equipment, small motors and most other electronic items, according to Susan Sonday, CEO of Emerald eCycling, LLC. One item that cannot be accepted would be tube TVs.
Her company collects and recycles all of these gadgets, takes them apart for their innards to sell in the “downstream” market, she says. Her company has conducted some “small collection” events since its beginning in May of 2013, but this will be the biggest one she has tried. She plans to pull out all the stops to make it a success.
They will even take hard drives, disable them, shred them at their office following the event and provide a certificate of data destruction for a fee of $10 to the computer owner. Sonday has plenty of experience in this field, having worked for Nokia in Chicago, and before that at Johnson Controls, managing electronic products. She is an electrical engineer, with her jobs requiring her to find a safe way to dispose of older equipment. Her mantra is “reuse, refurbish and recycle,” now that her company has found a home in Kalamazoo.
“It’s important to recycle to keep toxic substances out of landfills, save energy, recover and reuse raw materials,” she points out. It’s impossible for her to know how much will be collected in one Saturday morning, so she is bringing in a 26-foot box truck that will accept 26,000 lbs. of stuff, along with a smaller trailer that can move back and forth to her warehouse on ML Ave., just off Sprinkle Road.
For those who can’t make it to the Saturday morning event and have sufficient amount of inventory, she offers free local pick-up by making an appointment through the web site at http://www.emerald-ecycling.com or calling 269-978-1914.