e-Cycle depot opens for electronic waste recycling

On Sunday 1 May 2011, Nelson ReUse and Recycle Centre (NRRC), a business unit of Nelson Environment Centre opened their doors for year-round recycling of electronic waste (e-waste), with the launch of an onsite e-Cycle depot.

NRRC is one of the flag-ship sites for the nationwide e-Cycle project, which expects to have 20 sites up and running by the end of June 2011.

Local NRRC manager Murray Simms said he was excited that they are able to collect e-waste under the e-Cycle banner which gives them an environmentally conscious option for recycling the electronics. In the past they have only been able to accept a small quantity of this waste type if it was saleable, because the recycling option was not available.

“We have to assume that much of what we couldn’t accept would have ended up in landfill”.

“eDay has provided a solution for some over the last three years but our customers were wanting a solution for all electronic waste , including televisions, every day”.

E-waste is the fastest growing type of waste in the world (estimated at 80,000 tonnes per year in NZ) and is more toxic than normal household rubbish.

Electronic devices are a complex mixture of several hundred materials. Some are valuable, e.g. gold, silver, platinum and palladium, which occur in the circuit boards of desktop computers. However, many devices such as TVs and CRT monitors contain toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium, and hazardous chemicals such as brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic is also frequently used. Generally, the older the equipment, the more toxic material it contains.
Now thanks to the government’s Waste Minimisation Fund, NRRC has found the solution they’ve been looking for to recycle these hazardous materials. The e-Cycle Project is a partnership between RCN, a national leader in e-waste recycling and CRN (Community Recycling Network), a national grass root recycling organisation, of which Nelson Environment Centre is a member. The request for government funding of e-Cycle was supported by many local authorities including Nelson City and Tasman District Councils with the setup at NRRC done in liaison with Nelmac and NCC.

There will be a charge for people dropping off old computers, televisions and other e-waste to cover the costs of safe and responsible recycling. These costs include labour, freight, the use of dismantling equipment and other logistics costs.

The prices have been set by RCN, a NZ-owned family firm in Auckland which will organise all the reprocessing and refurbishing of the e-waste collected round the country.

Nelson Environment Centre’s Waste Manager Karen Driver, who has also jointly managed the nationwide implementation of e-Cycle for CRN, said consumers may start thinking more about the benefits of product stewardship when faced with the costs of recycling e-waste.

“We think the people who make and sell the products should pay for the recycling” she said. “We’d love to see producer responsibility in the electronics industry”.

“If producers had to pay for recycling of their products, then they would have an incentive to make their products last longer, be upgradable and reduce toxic materials used. As it is now, their only incentive is to sell more appliances and make more profits and the consumer has the problem of disposing of the equipment at the end of its life”.

Mr Simms said RCN states that it is committed to doing as much as possible of the recovery and processing of e-waste in New Zealand.

RCN is pleased that CRT televisions and monitors from the South Island will be able to be processed in Christchurch, despite the recent earthquake damage to the city.

Some items will be refurbished or recycled in Auckland (cabling, metals, unleaded glass). Some materials have to be recycled off-shore (circuit boards, leaded glass, cartridges, batteries and plastic), because there is no option to do it in New Zealand.

Members of the RCN team have visited the off-shore factories, and report that their working conditions are of a high standard, and that they are ISO 14001 accredited and meet international regulations to minimise environmental harm.

The factories are located in Australia, Singapore, Japan and China.