San Diego disposes of e-waste

Electronics Recycling Center located on Linda Vista Road is celebrated after seven years of operation

Glenn McDonell | Contributor | USD Vista

On Earth Day seven years ago, University of San Diego’s Electronics Recycling Center opened its doors to the San Diego community for the first time, adding it to the list of student-led ventures. These have made the university a national leader in environmental responsibility.

Last week the center hosted an open house that celebrated the success it has enjoyed since it began in 2011.

The event was put on to showcase its operations and bring more awareness to the role it plays in the community, according to Arthur Atkinson, supervisor and business development manager.

Atkinson has been managing the recycling center since it began and said that the operation is the only one of its kind in the San Diego area.

“There are other e-waste recycling centers in San Diego, but they’re only open on Saturdays and you have to make an appointment to do a drop-off,” Atkinson said. “Ours is open during regular business hours six days out of the week because we want to make it easier for people to do the right thing.”

The center’s location on Linda Vista Road, at the western edge of campus and at the bottom of the hill, makes it accessible not only for those on campus, but also for the surrounding San Diego community.

Atkinson stated that the center is frequented by homeowners who are looking for responsible ways to get rid of everything from laptops to dishwashers to old iPhones.

“By making the choice to drop your old or unwanted items with us instead of throwing them out, you’re diverting harmful e-waste like alkaline batteries from ending up in landfills, where they take up space and pose a threat to the environment,” Atkinson said.

Last year, the Miramar Landfill announced that efforts like USD’s have extended the life of the landfill by  years. Even with these operations in place, only 12 percent of e-waste ends up getting recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

When electronics end up in landfills instead of being processed by centers like USD’s, the precious metals used as conductors are thrown out too. The most recent data from the EPA reported that over $60 million in gold and silver from smartphones is thrown in the trash.

The center has a team of volunteers who disassemble the devices that people bring in and then separate the component parts into large bins.

The content of these bins are then packaged and sent off to special processing facilities such as CalMicro of San Diego, where the valuable materials to be used in manufacturing new products are then extracted.

Some of the components removed from the products the center receives contain a significant amount of value.

According to Atkinson, a box full of circuit boards can be worth as much as eight or nine hundred dollars.

“There’s a lot of shady business practices going on in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where children are often forced to work in dangerous conditions,” Atkinson said. “If we can get corporations to source these conflict materials from old computers then we can reduce abuses to land and people all over the world.”

The center’s operations have created social good a lot closer to home as well.

In 2013, the ERC began to set aside some of the more lightly used electronics to be sold in the front of the warehouse, starting what Atkinson referred to as the “goodwill business model.”

Since then, the store in the front has expanded to include a wide range of second-hand products, some of which are photographed and posted on Craigslist or eBay.

“I started noticing that a lot of the stuff we were receiving was really nice stuff and totally still working, and it seemed like a waste to be disassembling it before its useful life was up,” Atkinson said. “We knew that there were many people in our community who could really benefit from a sort of thrift store for electronics, so we started to sell some of it at low prices in the front of the warehouse.”

While thrift stores for clothing, furniture, and other second-hand items are relatively commonplace in the San Diego area, the ERC’s electronics store is unique.  Atkinson says that this is in no small part due to the planned obsolescence of computer products.

“Sometimes we really feel like we are fish swimming upstream when we try to encourage people to keep their old phones or computers for as long as they work,” Atkinson said. “Companies are always making new products with marginal differences from their previous models, which means that there is tons of stuff just sitting out there not being used.”

When these products end up on the center’s shelves rather than in people’s garages, they become available for those who could really make use of them.

“In this way we’re meeting a need of lower socioeconomic status people that gives them opportunities in the same way that Goodwill or Salvation Army does but with electronics,” Atkinson said.

The center’s storefront and warehouse operations have also created opportunities for a team of student workers and interns.

First-year Business Administration major Casey Evans joined the team earlier this year and stated he enjoys the work he does.

“It’s a super relaxed environment and everyone is very nice,” Evans said. “I like that I get to work with people and make a positive impact.”

Evans found out about the opportunity to be a part of the operation during last semester’s open house, in which he applied and began working soon after.

“When I first got here, I spent some time working the storefront and taking care of customers and people who came to drop stuff off,” Evans said. “I sometimes also work in the warehouse sorting everything into bins.”

As a non-profit organization, revenues from these store sales along with grant money are used exclusively to pay student staff members like Evans and to cover the center’s operating expenses.

As the storefront expanded, however, the center began to make a profit.

“In February, we did so well that we grossed over 20 thousand in excess of our monthly expenses,” Atkinson said.  “Once we’ve accrued around 60 thousand or more in reserve profits we’re going to purchase carbon offsets on behalf of the USD community to counter our footprint as an institution.”

According to Terrapass, one of the leading carbon offset enterprises, the average American produces 36 thousand pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

At their rate of $4.99 per one thousand pounds of carbon offset, the recycling center could very soon offset the carbon footprints of hundreds of USD students.

By providing San Diegans with a way to get rid of their e-waste, the USD’s Electronics Recycling Center is keeping toxic materials out of landfills.

This provides various opportunities for those in need, and could soon be reducing global emissions, one piece of “junk” at a time.