1 week Ago By Devika Desai
Got an old laptop and don’t know where to put it? There’s a bin right by the Ikea parking lot that will take it off your hands for you, people in green shirts ready to help and a truck ready to transport used and unwanted electronics off to groups who can better dispose of them. The free Electronic Recycling event is an annual initiative by Ikea, hosted by Green Calgary, in partnership with the Electronic Recycling Association (ERA) for Earth month. Today from 10 a.
m. till 3 p.m.
, anyone with an unwanted electronic, be it a laptop, phone, or television set, can bring their items to the initiative and drop them off for a better cause. “Our initiative is to try and take as many electronics as possible and keep them out of the landfills,” said Aaron-Robert Livermore, warehouse supervisor with ERA. Electronics still in fair and usable condition are repurposed and donated to schools, non-profits and other groups who have a need for them, while items in bad shape are given to companies whose expertise lies in disposing of them in a safe and environmentally sustainable manner.
“A lot of people don’t realize how much impact it has on the environment,” Livermore said. The metal components of an electronic, the chemicals used to manufacture it, “they’re leaking compounds into the soil and the environment around them,” he said. “Our purpose is to find different people that will actually do a proper end-of-life recycle point for it.
” By 10:30 a.m., just a half hour after set-up, some people had already come by to drop off old electronics — a pair of pink headphones, a few tablets, a Blu-ray player with a TV remote.
Depending on the weather, the initiative can draw more than 100 visitors, Livermore said, donating tablets, cell phones, vacuum cleaners, laptops, cable boxes and monitors. But that’s not all that gets donated, Livermore added. “An 80-inch projector,” he replied, when asked about the largest item ever received, to his experience.
Staff had to strap the television to the back wall of the truck to ensure it was stored safely when driving. But perhaps the most unusual item ever donated was the first computer to ever be used in Vancouver, Livermore said. “You’re talking very early ’60s or the ’70s,” he said.
“It still used ribbons to be able to give it its binary coatings and it still used vacuum tubes.” The company that owned it wanted to dispose of it, seeing no use for it anymore. As a lighthearted joke, his team placed the item on eBay, pricing it at a million dollars.
“Several people responded,” he said, including a buyer from Michigan who personally drove up to pick up the computer and its parts. The computer, he said, is now housed in a local museum in the U.S.
, although he couldn’t recall where. “It looked really, really cool,” he said. ddesai@postmedia.
com.
