Dell Recycling Tour Collects Almost 2 Million Pounds of PC Waste

Since the tour's launch in March, the company's monthly computer donations to the National Cristina Foundation, a national charitable organization that empowers people through technology, have doubled from prior monthly donation levels. Through direct outreach, the tour also helped raise awareness of the need to responsibly recycle computers to more than 1.2 million.

"Dell was able to divert almost 2 million pounds of electronic waste from landfills. That's about 70 tractor-trailers full of old computers," Pat Nathan, director of Dell Sustainable Business, says. "It couldn't have been done without the thousands of environmentally responsible consumers, the more than 100 partners and almost a thousand hard-working volunteers.

"Dell will be able to share our knowledge and experience gained from the Recycling Tour with other business and public organizations and to continue providing easy, affordable and environmentally safe methods for recycling."

The top three individual cities for one-day collection events were Denver, Portland and Atlanta.

Technology eligible for reuse is donated to local charities through Dell's donation partner, the National Cristina Foundation (NCF). Online donations to NCF have dramatically increased since March with 1,888 donations made from March to June. Donations must meet select minimum requirements such as Pentium II processors and include memory and hard drive. Consumers who donate also receive a 10 percent discount on online purchases of software and peripherals from dell.com.

Yvette Marrin, president of NCF, says, "The National Cristina Foundation is proud to partner with Dell in our work to get technology to the thousands of not for profits and public agencies that are part of our grassroots network and for taking a responsible position on researching the best practices that help both our environment and people in need."

The Recycling Tour is one of several educational initiatives sponsored by Dell to raise consumer awareness that "No Computer Should Go to Waste." Dell recently announced a partnership with the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) to develop a "Best Practices for Computer Recycling" report. The partnership will produce an outreach tool kit for municipal and university recycling coordinators and a special two-day training pilot program for recycling coordinators that includes hands-on management of a computer recycling collection event at a major university. Dell's work with NRC will share key lessons from the tour so that any community can stage a successful computer collection event.

Dell continues to offer industry-leading recycling programs for both consumers and businesses. Dell's consumer offering, Dell Recycling (www.dell4me.com/recycling), allows customers to register online for easy, low-cost home pick-up of unwanted notebooks, desktops, monitors, printers and other select peripherals. Since the March 19 launch, the Dell Recycling Web site has had more than 332,000 visits and recycling orders are growing 50 percent month over month.

Dell's enhanced recycling and value recovery services for business and government, healthcare and educational customers provide a fast, easy-to-use program that helps protect confidential data and dispose of hardware in a manner designed to safeguard the environment. With a computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse constituting one system, recycling begins at a cost of $49 per system, and value recovery starts at $59 per system. For more information, please visit http://www.dell.com/assetrecovery.