Right after spring term ends every June, Chris Horton of Eugene gets annoyed when he sees trash bins filled with items such as television sets, alarm clocks and furniture.
“There aren’t enough people who care about (recycling),” he said. “People throw things like that out just because they’re leaving town when they can just as easily take it down to Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. But they don’t.”
Horton volunteers with NextStep Recycling, a local non-profit organization with a slogan of “Transforming e-waste for the next generation.”
While the term “recycling” is most often associated with plastic bottles or aluminum cans, NextStep accepts electronics such as cell phones, video game consoles, cameras, desktop and laptop computers and accessories, including printers and ink jet cartridges, monitors and mice.
“We take technology, we refurbish it and we gift it to disenfranchised populations,” explained founder Lorraine Kerwood. “We refurbish to the best of our ability. What’s not refurbishable, we dismantle and then recycle with processors in the Northwest who meet our environmental stewardship standards.”
| The Coalition Against Environmental Racism is hosting an open house today beginning at 5:30 p.m. in the Multicultural Center, Suite 33 on the bottom floor of the EMU. Free Café Yumm! and Sweet Life food will be provided during a workshop on environmental racism and environmental justice issues. After the workshop, the open house will move to The Break, also on the bottom floor of the EMU, for more food and free pool. More than 30 student groups are hosting an Earth Day celebration beginning at 11 a.m. in the EMU Amphitheater that will feature 12 hours of live music, guerilla seed ball workshops (seed balls are used to plant seeds), an art mural, nature walks and screen printing of Earth Day T-shirts (students must bring T-shirts). NextStep Recycling is collecting cell phones and iPods, including all peripherals such as headsets and holsters, for recycling free of charge. Cell phones contain toxic substances that can leech into soil and water if not properly recycled. Today: Eugene Public Library, 100 W 10th Ave., 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Wednesday: Market of Choice, 1060 Green Acres Road, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Thursday: Market of Choice, 2580 Willakenzie Road, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Friday: Market of Choice, 1960 Franklin Blvd., 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday: Market of Choice, 67 W 29th Ave., 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. |
Monday afternoon, Kerwood was stationed in front of the UO Duck Store collecting people’s obsolete electronics in order to keep them out of landfills and out of the ocean.
“It’s a huge legacy for us to have such an important organization in our community to be taking responsibility for stuff from the landfill, being shipped to China,” said Karyn Kaplan, the University’s recycling program manager. “There’s heavy metals in there that are toxic for the environment.”
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, one cell phone – which contains copper, nickel, chromium, cadmium and lead – can pollute 158,200 gallons of water. Kaplan said landfills, where the EPA estimates 65 million cell phones end up each year, generate methane, one of the top greenhouses gases.
In addition to donating old technology to NextStep, Kaplan said University students can decrease their environmental impact by using reusable shopping bags and water bottles, and not putting plastic bags and coffee cups into the recycling bin.
“People throw coffee cups in the recycling because it looks like paper,” she said. “It has plastic in it and it’s contaminated with coffee.”
Over the weekend, NextStep collected more than 500 cell phones. Kerwood said she’s thankful for the media making sustainability more mainstream.
“NextStep exists because Lane County is a community that believes in recycling and wants to know about recycling,” she said. “When I first started this, people were like, ‘Thank God!’ Now folks are asking for statistics.”
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