Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 12/8/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Derek Sijder Volunteers for the e-waste recycling weekend event wrap a crate of televisions near the Business Tower Parking lot on 10th Street on Saturday morning.

Twenty-four volunteers and community members helped collect about 20,000 pounds of electronic waste throughout Santa Clara County on Saturday and Sunday as part of a two-day e-waste recycling event.

The Center for Development of Recycling, which is a nonprofit entity at SJSU, and the company First Choice Recycling joined together with Electronic Recyclers to collect and dispose of used electronics in an environmentally friendly way.

"This event helps to get e-waste into the right hands, rather than the wrong ones, because what happens is a lot of people will take their old computer monitors, VCRs, useless electronic equipment, and just toss it in the regular trash can," said Laura Moll, a volunteer at the event and a junior art major.

"Another problem is that sometimes people do take their e-waste to a recycling plant," she added. "However, some recycling plants are not environmentally sound. What we want to do is make sure that this electronic waste gets to plants that reuse the components in an environmentally sound way."

Jim Boudinot, the owner of First Choice Recycling, said they weren't able to meet their goal of collecting 40,000 pounds of e-waste because of a delay in getting the insurance policy needed to have the event at SJSU.

"We had to run through hoops just to get the insurance policies and everything in alignment to run this event on San Jose State," he said. "San Jose State has a very large insurance policy and they don't want to have anybody get hurt out here because then it would really affect the whole university. They would rather put the burden on someone who wants to help."

Although this event had been in the works for months, Boudinot said they only had about a week to work on it after getting clearance. To help get the e-waste event off the ground, Boudinot worked with Bruce Olszewski, the director for development of recycling at SJSU.

"I approached Bruce, he only gets a certain amount of money from Santa Clara County to run his program, so he's on a very lean budget and I said I thought it would be nice to do a fundraiser for his organization," Boudinot said.

Continued...

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