4 million pounds and counting

The Solid Waste Agency of Lake County (SWALCO), Gurnee, Ill., and Sims Recycling Solutions, with Americas headquarters in West Chicago, Ill., joined to promote electronics recycling on Earth Day, April 22, 2014. Currently SWALCO, with the support of Sims, host 18 permanent collection sites and a variety of one-day and seasonal collection events throughout Lake County, Ill. All events are posted on the SWALCO website in the collections section.

As of Jan. 1, 2012, the Illinois Electronic Products Recycling and Reuse Act landfill ban was enacted. This act prohibits electronic devices, such as televisions, monitors, computers, printers and more, from being discarded in the regular trash.

Since 2000, SWALCO has been providing opportunities for residents to safely and conveniently dispose of those electronic items at community recycling events.  With the help of Sims Recycling Solutions, SWALCO successfully collected nearly 4 million pounds of electronics in 2013. More than 3 million pounds of that material was covered under the Illinois Electronics Take Back Law and collected on behalf of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) affected by the law.

"The continued success of Lake County’s residential electronics collection program would not be possible without the support and hard work that has been dedicated to this program by our 42 municipal members that make up SWALCO," says Pete Adrian, program  coordinator for the SWALCO electronics collection program. "We also are fortunate to be partnered with Sims Recycling Solutions, not only are they an Illinois business, they are uniquely qualified to provide support to our program by having the capability to properly manage the high volume of materials coming from all our collection sites.”

Items accepted at these collection events include cable and satellite receivers, computer cables, CD drives, cellphones, PDAs, computers (CPUs, desktops, laptops and tablets), digital converter boxes, digital recorders, DVD players, fax machines, keyboards, mice, monitors, MP3 players, printers, scanners, small scale servers, televisions, VCRs, video game consoles, flash drives, small household appliances (no glass parts, holiday lights, media (VCR tapes, DVDs, compact discs and floppy discs), batteries and more.

Items that cannot be accepted include air conditioners, broken glass, dehumidifiers, electric fixtures, fluorescent light bulbs, large household appliances, lead acid batteries, liquid or chemical waste, packaging materials and smoke and fire detectors.

All electronics collected are recycled at a local Sims Recycling Solutions facility.

More information on the SWALCO collection sites and materials accepted is available at www.swalco.org/Collections/Electronics/Pages/default.aspx#.