When I turned off Main Street toward the old Blacksburg Middle School, there were people waiting for me. They guided me with hand gestures and I followed their mimed instructions to pull into a chute of more people. When I came to a stop, eager hands opened the doors of my car and began pulling out a variety of objects. No, I wasn't the victim of a well-organized carjacking; I was taking advantage of an electronic waste recycling event held recently in Blacksburg.
I watched my old tangerine iMac with a bad motherboard as it was taken to a pallet to be shrink-wrapped down with its many companions. A box containing a dead Dell printer, a blown power supply and other miscellaneous parts also was whisked away. Total time taken: about 30 seconds.
Later I talked to Rob Lowe of Virginia Tech's Environmental, Health and Safety Services. He had organized the e-waste recycling event, which was sponsored by a major computer manufacturer -- a generous company that asked for no publicity.
Recently, the television show "60 Minutes" aired a feature on e-waste. Computers and their peripherals such as monitors contain dangerous materials such as lead and mercury. The program followed an e-waste recycler in Colorado and found the company shipping a container full of monitors to Hong Kong, even though the recycler claimed to keep everything in the United States, and despite the fact that China has banned the import of dead electronics. A guide from the Basel Action Network, a toxic waste watchdog group, took the "60 Minutes" team to Guiyu, a town in China that has been devastated by electronic waste from other countries.
I asked Lowe how the e-waste collected at the Blacksburg event would be handled. He explained that the sponsor had elected to recycle all the parts, an expensive process known as complete material recovery, and to do it all in the U.S.
This recycling event started last year, when Hollins University, Tech, the University of Richmond and Old Dominion University teamed up for a statewide recycling extravaganza. Normally, in Montgomery County, if you wanted to dispose of electronic waste, you would have to take it to the Solid Waste Authority and pay a fee to part with it. When the sponsor offered to take e-waste for free and to pay the laborers to collect, sort, pack and move it, Lowe jumped at the opportunity. The Tech department already recycles monitors, fluorescent tubes, batteries and other potentially hazardous items for the university, so it was a good fit to manage the event. All it had to provide was a space to hold it.
Last year, the event collected 850,000 pounds of material statewide, 122,000 pounds of it from Tech. That's enough to fill seven tractor-trailers. This year, more than four truckloads were collected from the Blacksburg community, and over the past two years four truckloads were taken from Montgomery County Public Schools. That's roughly a $50,000 savings for the school system and county taxpayers.
Lowe said he was not sure whether the department will hold the event again next year. The bulk of what was recycled thus far was obsolete computers and monitors, but there were a few unusual donations such as a jar of mercury that had been saved for years.
Lowe said he expected to see lots of unusable computers (there are already places to donate fixable computers to be refurbished and reused, such as at the local YMCA), but said he was surprised to see people bringing in turntables and television sets from the 1940s and '50s -- some families had not known how to get rid of them in an environmentally responsible way. Lowe encouraged anyone interested in ongoing efforts to improve recycling options to check out Sustainable Blacksburg (sustainableblacksburg.org), a local nonprofit group that focuses on environmental stewardship.
Lowe, his department, the Virginia schools that helped organize the recycling events and their mysterious benefactor all deserve our thanks. It's good for the environment, the community, our pocketbooks and our closet space. I won't miss that old iMac one bit.
Pris Sears lives in Blacksburg and works at Virginia Tech.