Electronics recycling available in Polson
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POLSON — Billed as “e-rase your e-waste,” the Lake County Transfer Station held its first electronic recycling day on May 22 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Mark Nelson, Project Manager for the Lake County Solid Waste District, said the recycling project netted 4,780 pounds of electronics, mostly TVs, monitors, CPUs and miscellaneous items. This was a pretty good showing for Lake County’s first electronic recycling day.
Sandra Boggs, a State of Montana Department of Environmental Quality Recycling and Market Development Specialist, agreed. Boggs thinks more and more people will attend the recycling day.
Boggs said, “ … What will happen is awareness will keeping growing. For a one-day event sometimes people just can’t make it.”
For the fiscal year 2009, Boggs said Montanans recycled over 495,000 pounds of electronics, making over 1.5 million pounds since the state started keeping records in 2006.
Tatooine Electronic Services, from Billings and Cheyenne, Wyo. hauled away and will recycle the old electronic gadgets. Kalispell also had scheduled an electronic recycling day on May 22, and Libby sponsored an event on May 21 so Tatooine could collect their electronic waste too.
As for why people have to pay to have their electronics recycled, Boggs said a big part of the reason is so much needs to be taken apart before the items can be recycled. All that dismantling takes a lot of manual labor, which costs money.
Some operations that advertise free electronic recycling illegally ship electronics overseas, Boggs said.
Nelson explained Tatooine was chosen because it breaks down the electronics in the United States and doesn’t ship them overseas.
The DEQ is seeing increased demand for recycling in general and receiving calls from across the state, including many small communities.
Nelson thanked Judy Preston, Cynthia Forsch and Robin Nelson for their help as well as sponsors Montana DEQ, Lake County Transfer Station, Allied Waste, RTC, Wal-Mart, Glacier Bank, Harvest Foods, Ronan Dodge, Henry Kundig, Ronan Power Products and Valley Bank.
To check information on recycling, go to www.recycle.mt.gov or www.valleyrecycling.com.
