Handling E-waste in a Responsible Manner

The EPA is estimating that consumers will retire two million tons of e-waste in 2007.
Virtually all of the electronics contain lead, cadmium, chromium, phosphorous, arsenic, vanadium, and mercury that are banned from landfills.
Televisions, especially the poor quality ones, comprise over 50% of all e-waste.

All of this can, and does, leach into the soil, ground water, air, and our own bodies. Every time we landfill old electronics, especially computers and televisions, we are contributing to a looming toxic waste problem that is killing us.

As yet, there is some cost to properly "demanufacturing" electronics, but at Greg's Electronics, we are constantly searching for ways to properly recycle e-waste in an environmentally responsible manner. By subsidizing the handling and shipping of this e-waste, we make it more economical for you to dispose of. Although we cannot yet handle all e-waste, we have located various facilities to properly recycle many items back into raw materials or materials for remanufacturing processes. All are in Canada. Nothing is shipped overseas.

Security: We also handle computer hard disk drives (the data containing device) in ways to fully protect your privacy. All functional hard drives are first removed from the computer and run through a special "zero fill" process. Non-functional hard drives are electromagnetically erased. These processes are much more effective than a simple format as they also destroy the file system and the partition table, not just the data on the drive. Then the drive is physically rendered inoperative by removing a key internal component. Breaking the "clean room" seal of the drive and removing either the heads or the platter reduces the chance of salvaging data off the drive virtually to zero. Then the drives are shipped to a facility where they are shredded. The end result is secure destruction of sensitive data. Nothing goes "out to the curb".

Why do some things cost and others are free?
Each item must be disassembled and sorted into plastics, metal, circuit boards, etc, and items like printers, DVD players, and VCRs take a long time to disassemble and have a high plastic content, hence the $5 fee. For the $5 though, you are getting a complete recycling service for an item that is very time consuming and costly to recycle properly.
Anything with a picture tube, like the big "old style" computer monitors and television sets takes more to recycle. Picture tubes must be smeltered to be recycled. The only place to smelter them is in B.C. and they must be shipped there by rail. Broken tubes release hazardous phosphorous dust, so they must be shipped whole. There is a shipping expense there that my business simply cannot absorb, hence the higher charge for items with picture tubes. For that price though, you are again getting a proper recycling service for an item that is otherwise very hazardous for the environment.

How much actually gets recycled, and how much ends up in a landfill anyway?
100% of the computer systems, hard drives, ink and toner cartridges, batteries and dish receivers get recycled. Nothing goes into a landfill from those items. A few small rubber and felt parts contained in computer printers get landfilled, as we can't find recycling facilities for them yet. There are also some small rubber gaskets in projection televisions that get landfilled for the same reason. We have not found any place to recycle projection tube coolant either, but we are storing it on site at the present time, rather than disposing of it in an environmentally unfriendly way.