Brockville Climate Action Group

Kingston Whig / Jennifer Pritchett / 27 May 2008

During the 42 years that Keith Colborne has run a television and stereo repair shop, he has sent an estimated 6,000 TVs to the landfill because the items couldn’t be fixed.

He has never felt good about it, but he didn’t have a choice. Electronic recycling programs just didn’t exist.

But that’s all changing.

While the province is still mulling a proposed plan to recycle electronic waste through a fee-based system, Sony has established depots to keep old televisions, stereos, VCRs and other equipment out of landfills.

Colborne’s TV and Stereo Ltd., an authorized Sony repair shop, is one of those depots.

“It’s a great idea,” Colborne said.

Through a large recycling firm called Global Electric Electronic Processing Inc. (GEEP), which operates across Canada and the United States, Sony has established the recycling program at a handful of locations across Ontario, including Ottawa and Whitby.

In the Kingston area, the public can return all Sony-brand electronics to Colborne’s shop on O’Connor Drive in the city’s west end. The service is free.

“Sony approached us and we certainly agreed that this was a good project,” said Colborne.

“It’s always bothered us that we have to put any of the parts of a TV into a landfill. Before, we would strip them down as much as we could and then got rid of the metal parts through recyclers, but all the other stuff like plastics went to a landfill.”

Geep picks up the waste to dismantle and recycle the materials at its sprawling 30,000-square-foot electronics recycling facility in Barrie.

“They basically reprocess every part of the television set,” said Colborne. “They grind up what they can’t melt and they take it down to where they can extract lead, copper and gold. There’s a fair amount of gold [gold-plated ends on cables] in this stuff and that’s one of the things that helps make it worthwhile.”

He said electronic equipment such as televisions are made from harmful materials such as phosphorus (found in the picture tube) and lead.

“If they were buried, they’d last forever,” he said. “There is a fair amount of lead in the glass, but it would always stay there. It wouldn’t leach out into the soil. The glass is never going to break down in our lifetime.”

Some projection television sets also use a high-intensity lamp that contains mercury and other harmful chemicals.

“A lot of that has been going to landfills because people didn’t know what else to do with them,” said Colborne.

Not wanting to send them to a landfill, he’s been saving the bulbs at his repair shop. He’s collected more than 100 of them over the years.

The new Sony electronic waste program accepts those light bulbs free of charge.

While Colborne’s family-run business won’t make any money on providing the service for Sony, the businessman didn’t need any convincing that it’s the responsible thing to do.

The public has been quick to respond as well.

In the first two weeks since Colborne started the service, half of the storage space it had allotted was filled with discarded Sony equipment.

When the repair shop became a authorized electronic collection site, the recycler installed two storage lockers, each about the size of a closet, at the repair shop to hold the equipment to be recycled.

Colborne is certain the space won’t be large enough to accommodate the amount of electronics he expects to receive from the public.

“To every person I’ve spoken to, they’re very enthusiastic about the idea,” he said. “I think it has hurt everybody to think that this stuff has gone to landfill for a long time. Any solution I think is going to be accepted and appreciated.”

While Sony is funding the recycling program for its own products, GEEP will accept other brands. The only difference is, the customer has to pay to have those items recycled. Those fees run anywhere from $15 for a 15-inch television to $50 for a large photocopier.

When GEEP comes to collect the equipment, Colborne turns over those fees he collected from the public for the non-Sony equipment. GEEP pays him a handling fee based on the weight of all the material he collected.

“They’re paying a handling fee [by weight] to us,” he said. “It’s a break-even thing. It’s not something we’re ever going to make any money on.”

Colborne said it’s more important than ever to come up with ways of recycling electronic waste, particularly for televisions because more of them are turning up at his repair shop that can’t be repaired as a result of the lack of available parts.

“There’s more now than ever before because they don’t last the way they did … in the last six or eight years, sets have only lasted half as long as the old ones did,” he said.

The province’s electronic waste proposal is a $62-million plan that would see 650 depots – four times the number that exist now – open across the province where people can drop off discarded electronics to have them recycled.

The plan is broken down into per-item fees that would be charged directly to the manufacturer or the first importer of the electronics. It’s up to the manufacturer as to how they want to pay for the extra costs: pass the cost on to the customer or absorb the cost.

The proposal was posted on the Environmental Bill of Rights registry April 9 for a 30-day comment period.

[ ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE ]