Bowman and Judy Yee pulled their car up to the
electronics area at Southeastern Oakland County
Resource Recovery Authority's Troy drop-off
recycling center on a recent morning and unloaded
items, including a computer monitor. "We're pretty
uncomfortable with the idea of taking it to the
curb," said Judy Yee, of Huntington Woods. "We'd
much rather recycle it. This way the hazardous waste
won't go into the landfill," agreed Bowman Yee.
Sarah Leight of Troy,
meanwhile, pulled up and said of the computer she
was recycling that "It would have been so expensive
to buy new parts, it wasn't worth it." "It's very
easy," she added of the recycling process.
"E-WASTE"
Tom Dean, facility
supervisor, says people drop off their computers for
recycling at the Coolidge Road drop-off site pretty
much daily. "This is a waste diversion," he said.
"To throw it away would still be cost-effective, but
not environmentally safe," "We actually call this
e-waste," he said of the 3-year-old program. The
program anticipates state regulations against
putting e-waste in landfills, he said. Currently,
it's still legal to put computers at the curb.
SOCRRA, which includes Lathrup Village, pays
Detroit-based Great Lakes Electronics Corp. by the
pound to take them away and process them into other
items.
VALUABLE METALS
Great Lakes was founded by
Nathan Zack of Birmingham eight years ago in his
garage. Signifying the ever-increasing loads of
out-of-date and broken computers, "we now have over
100 employees and have four different facilities,"
said vice president Kerry Gurshoff. It collects 60
million pounds of computer-related e-waste a year.
That number increases by about 30 percent a year.
"You can't imagine it," he said of the amount they
get in. "We can take all of that and dispense of it
properly." Computers aren't refurbished. About 5
percent of parts can be sold for re-use. The rest is
broken down into raw material and sold for its
valuable metals. "Monitors have several pounds of
lead, that's why they are so heavy," said Bill
Munday, sales manager. With other toxic heavy metals
in old PCs, including cadmium and mercury, it's
critical to the environment to keep them from
landfills and incinerators, he said.
A NEW FIELD
On this morning at Troy's
SOCRRA, Mike Peters stood by a huge box filled with
computer monitors and printers, as well as remotes,
microwaves and television sets, and waited to unload
electronic items from cars. "You see all kinds of
stuff you've never seen before," he said. "A lot of
times you see old record players." "It's become an
electronics world," said Dean. "Back in 1980, we
didn't even have microwaves. A cell phone was like
James Bond," he said, musing on the change.
