1st Champaign County Electronic Recycling Event Set for Sat March 5th

Your old TV sets, tape decks, VCR's and computers are all welcome at Saturday's electronics recycling event on the north side of Champaign. It's one of four recycling collections held each year in Champaign County.

Bart Hagston is the environmental sustainability manager for the city of Urbana, which co-sponsors the event. He said he hopes that people will get into the habit of recycling their old electronic gear. He cautions that next year, simply throwing the items into the trash will not be an option. Starting Jan. 1, 2012, computers, computer monitors, printers and televisions will be banned from Illinois landfills.

"People will no longer be able to set those out with the regular trash," Hagston said. "So we're trying to help people get rid of any backlog of these items that they have in their home."

Hagston said the contractor they've hired to perform the recycling follows all state regulations on data security, to ensure that no data is stolen from the old computer hard drives that are dropped off at the event.

If it's a reusable computer hard drive, they have software approved by the Department of Defense to erase that, and then they can reuse it," Hagston said. "Or of it's not a working drive, or it's an older drive that's not going to get reused, they will shred it and then recycle the metals."

Besides computers, computer accessories and TV's, the electronic recycling event will takes fax machines, mobile phones DVD and VCR players, MP3 players, PDA's and video game consoles. No more than ten items per resident will be accepted.

The electronic recycling event runs Saturday, March 5th, from 8 AM until noon at the News-Gazette Distribution Center on Apollo Drive, just off North Market Street in Champaign. To keep the traffic flowing smoothly, Hagston said motorists should approach the site on Market Street from the south ...and follow the signs.

The Champaign County Regional Planning Authority is the main sponsor for Saturday's electronic recycling event. For more information, call 384-2302