For the third consecutive year, Clara Charest-Marcotte, the project manager of project 3RV of the eco-quartier Peter-McGill, has asked partner organizations to participate in the gathering of electronic products. This initiative is to be carried over in parallel to Earth day.
The idea is simple : the project manager provides a box where people can deposit televisions, desktops, laptops, and other accesories such as mice, monitors, printers, digitizers, audio and video recording systems, phones, cameras, wires and cables, CDs and DVDs, hard drives, or even printer cartridges.
This yearly collect is done within an ecologically responsible initiative.
It aims to recover outdated electronic equipment so as to give it a second life, or to valorise it so as to limit the noxious impacts such products have on the environment.
In Quebec only, we purchase every year more than 3 000 000 electronic products, which have an average life of two to three years. As we consume electronics on such a large scale, we also produce a lot of electronic waste.
In 2019, 10 partner organizations agreed to volunteer to receive a box and participate in the eco-quartier Peter-McGill’s initiative.
Indeed, the initiative allowed us to collect 483,5 kg of electric and electronic waste.
This is more than the quadruple of last year’s yield ! It is a record collection !
This can be explained due to the doubled number of participants. But above all, these new volunteers took advantage of the initiative to empty the equipment they had accumulated over the years. The good news is that volunteer organizations with which we had previously worked had very little to throw away because they had learned how to dispose of such waste in an ecologically responsible manner, and did so year round. Maybe they won’t need to participate in next year’s collect, as they will fly with their own wings.
Thanks to this event, the eco-quartier Peter-McGill proves that individual contributions aiming to reduce one’s environmental footprint can have a significant collective impact, as small as they may be individually.
To minimize the footprint of the collect, Sara dragged a cart on foot throughout the neighborhood, and gathered these organizations’ full boxes.
It is with the help of her legs and with the strength of her arms that she went door-to-door to all our partners and pulled close to 500kg of electronic waste throughout the neighborhood. When the boxes were all brought back, she gave them to the ARPE.
This collect was set in motion with the partnership with the Electronic Products Recycling Association (ARPE).
This organization aims to ameliorate the efficiency of electronic appliances recycling programs. The organization’s goal is to avoid electronic burial sites.
After being brought together these products are treated according the 3RV hierarchy (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, valorize)
Which means that when possible these objects will be reused.
They are then reintegrated in the supply chain so as to reduce the use of natural resources.
If reusing them is not possible the products will be recycled.
Recycling or transformation of electronic products is the last resort, done when reuse is no longer possible. Recycling electronic products necessitates a process of transformation, as one must manually disassemble and sort components. This thorough sorting allows to separate plastics from metals (steel, aluminum, copper), from dangerous components (cadmium, arsenic, mercury…). Disassembling products that have come to the end of their life cycle allows recycling plants to separate different reusable parts. These parts are then reintegrated in the cycle of production.
However, certain products have no viable recycling options.
This is the case for old television sets, which are discarded.
You too can involve yourself in the reduction of cyber waste by agreeing to receive an electronic waste box next year- please contact Clara Charest-Marcotte at : 3rv.eqpm@saesem.org or call the éco-quartier Peter-McGill : (514) 933-1069
