In an effort to reduce the amount of environmental wastes being improperly disposed of the Geosciences Club will host an electronic recycling event in the Bolin Hall parking lot Dec. 1 from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m.
“It’s an opportunity for club members to provide a service for the community and aid our local environment,” faculty adviser Jonathan Price said. “This event seemed to fill a local need for e-waste management and fit to the club’s mission towards environmental service.”
Geosciences Club Vice President Jennifer McDaniel said as geologist and environmental scientists, they understand the impact thousands of pounds of e-waste has on the enviornment.
“We are doing our part for the environment, and for our community,” McDaniels said. We hope that the turn out will be even better than last year and that we can continue to do this for years to come.”
President of the Geosciences Club Roman Reyes has helped with the electronic recycling event for two years.
Last year, the drive collected just less than 6,000 pounds of recycled electronic material.
Sims Recycling Solutions sponsors the event free and donates $0.02 per pound to the Geosciences Club for hosting the recycling drive.
“The Geosciences Club at MSU in association with Sims Recycling Solutions offer this as a free service to Wichita Falls and the surrounding communities. This is our second annual event, we expect to continue this as a staple program of the MSU Geosciences Club,” Reyes said.
Price said it is important to keep heavy metals out of the landfills that may penetrate groundwater.
“Our purpose is a service to the community, both in the short term by collecting potentially hazardous materials and the long term by passing along a sense of personal environmental responsibility.”
By recycling these rare earth materials found in electronics, it reduces the need to mine for new raw elements.
“Modern electronic devices typically contain a small volume of heavy metals and other potential environmental contaminants that are best kept out of the landfill. Recycling also provides an opportunity to reutilize the materials in obsolete electronics,” Price said.
Devices turned in endure a multi-stage recycling process where pre-existing data on the electronics cannot be recovered ensuring legal compliance and complete erasure of the data.
“The recycling process does not pick-and-choose certain equipment to be refurbished or sold on the secondary market. Every item from cell phones to computers and hard drives are crushed and shredded in a multi-stage recycling process. All devices are fully dismantled and processed from recoverable metals and base materials. No data can be recovered,” Reyes said.
Even with data security, Price encourages participants to wipe hard drives and devices before the recycling process.
“The best security is that implemented by the user – removing and wiping any and all information prior to recycling is always a good idea,” Price said.
Bringing a recycling center to Wichita Falls allows for students and the community to properly dispose of unwanted electronics. Club Vice President Jennifer McDaniel said this provides a service for the community that normally is not available, and benefits the Geosciences Club.
“The real benefit to the club and the community is being able to provide a service not normally available in Wichita Falls. There are a lot of people who want to dispose of their used electronics in the right way, but have no where to bring them short of driving to Dallas,” McDaniel said.
Reyes said environmentally, students have all benefitted from this event already.
“We know that there are 6,000 pounds of heavy metals and other consumer goods not decaying in local landfill and introducing potentially harmful materials into our local atmosphere and water supply.”
Financially, the club benefits from the donation made by Sims based on the total collection, Reyes said.
“Intrinsically, the club and its members and associate faculty benefit from knowing they’ve had a genuine and measureable positive impact on local and regional environmentalism,” he said.