Recycle Old Electronics This Holiday Weekend

The Lower East Side Ecology Center (LESEC) and Council Member James are sponsoring an electronics recycling to take place on Saturday November 24, from 10am to 4pm, Sunday November 25, from 10am to 4pm, and Monday November 26, from 4pm to 7pm. The event is being held at the Habana Outpost - Eco-Eatery, located at 757 Fulton Street at South Portland Avenue in Fort Greene.

Discarded computers and electronics are toxic hazardous waste. FYI - About 40% of the heavy metals in landfills, including lead, mercury and cadmium, come from discarded electronic equipment. The negative health effects of lead are well known, and just 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury can contaminate 20 acres of a lake - making the fish unfit to eat. And, FYI - it is estimated that in New York City, 34,000 tons of electronic equipment get tossed into the trash every year.

Items that may be dropped off for recycling are: working and non-working computers (laptop and desktop); servers, mainframes; monitors; printers; scanners; fax-machines; copiers; network devices (routers, hubs, modems, etc.); peripherals (keyboards, mice, cables, etc.); components (hard drives, CD roms, circuit boards, power supplies, etc.); TVs,VCR & DVD players; audio visual devices; radios/stereos; cell phones; pagers; PDAs; telecommunication (phones, answering machines, etc.); and media (floppies, cd’s, zips, and VHS tapes).

Also, LESEC requires their contracted electronics recycler to safeguard personal information on hard-drives by either physically destroying them, or wiping the hard drive clean to Department of Defense standards. But, if someone wants to do their own data removal, they can go to: www.killdisk.com. Also, another free program is Darik's Boot And Nuke at www.dban.sourceforge.net.

This computer recycling event is designed for New York City residents, and businesses should make their own arrangements with an electronics recycling company. Computer equipment dropped off during recycling events is loaded into trucks and transported by a contracted electronics recycling company to their facility. The hard drive is erased, and the equipment is evaluated and tested for reuse potential. Electronics are then de-manufactured (separated) into component parts for recycling.