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Australia Pushes Empties collections on Nat’l Recycling Week ( November 7th – 13th)
Australians can turn printer cartridges into pens during National Recycling Week
Australia Post is helping tackle e-waste during Planet Ark’s National Recycling Week (November 7 – 13) by making it easy for Australians to recycle printer cartridges and mobile phones into everything from pens to jewellery at Australia Post outlets.The Enviroliner felt tip pen is made from more than 95 per cent of recycled plastics and inks, with one cartridge making two pens.
Planet Ark Campaigns Manager, Brad Gray, says one third of people still throw their used printer cartridges in their home garbage bins.
"By making e-waste recycling so accessible Australia Post is helping to encourage more and more people to get involved," said Mr Gray.
Some of the toner cartridges collected by the program are returned to their original manufacturers for re-manufacturing or component recovery. The remaining cartridges are converted into new products such as pens, park benches and rulers.
The build up of old mobile phones is another major contributor to e-waste, with approximately 19 million unused mobile phones sitting in people’s cupboards and drawers across the country.
"If you collected all of these old phones and laid them out end-to-end, they would stretch from Brisbane to Adelaide," said Mr Twomey.
Old batteries can be recycled to make new batteries and circuit boards include small amounts of gold and silver that can be used to make jewellery.
Recycling old mobile phones and used printer cartridges is easy. People can simply visit their local post office and collect a MobileMuster Reply Paid satchel or place their old cartridges in the ‘Cartridges 4 Planet Ark’ recycling boxes located in store.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/switched-on-to-a-second-life-20111107-1n2xt.html
Switched on to a second life
While new regulations put the onus on manufacturers to ensure electronic goods are recycled, consumers have a role to play, writes Clive Hopkins.Almost 17 million televisions and computers nationwide reached the end of their useful life in 2007 and 2008. With no scheme in place for their recycling, many of them no doubt ended up in landfill.
All that is set to change next year with the introduction of the National Television and Computer Product Stewardship Scheme. With the introduction of free collection points across Australia, the sight of electronic devices dumped on nature strips should become a thing of the past.
Importantly, the scheme will be managed and paid for by television and computer manufacturers.
Cartridges 4 Planet Ark (C4PA) is a successful scheme that’s been operating for more than eight years. With drop-off points at Australia Post and many major retailers, the initiative has already recycled more than 16 million printer cartridges.
The head of campaigns for Planet Ark, Brad Gray, says printer cartridge companies are involved because of their corporate responsibility and environmental commitments. But this comes at a price. ”It means they’re carrying a cost that their competitors aren’t.”
The scheme works through a partnership between Planet Ark, which undertakes promotion and environmental oversight; materials recovery company Close the Loop, which does the physical recycling; and the manufacturers who pay for it.
Close the Loop guarantees that none of its waste ends up in landfill, a claim that Planet Ark audits. ”It’s a promise they’ve made and it’s a challenge for them,” Gray says.
This challenge has forced Close the Loop to be extremely innovative in developing markets for the recycled components. Their successes include the Enviroliner pen, made from recycled plastic and ink from cartridges, and a substance known as ”eWood”, which can be used in products such as garden furniture.
”It turns the disadvantage – [that] it lasts forever – into an advantage,” Gray says.
”The C4PA scheme has been fantastic for our industry,” Lexmark International’s marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand, Stephen Bell, says. ”It’s given us a consistent brand to engage the market with and we’ve built up a really broad collection network, which is a key component of its success.”
Bell says Lexmark and its competitors have similar mindsets about corporate responsibility – and, importantly, so do customers.
”They [customers] want to deal with responsible partners and suppliers and over time, it’s become one of their buying criteria. We now work with our customers to meet their own corporate social responsibility targets.”
Bell describes Close the Loop as ”the engine behind the brand. It’s a pretty impressive set-up.”
Another successful voluntary scheme is MobileMuster, which recycles discarded mobile phones through its network of 4500 drop-off points across Australia and through the mail with the help of Australia Post. Since its inception in 1999, it has recycled more than 5.9 million handsets and batteries.
The manager of recycling at MobileMuster, Rose Read, puts the success of the scheme down to three essentials – it’s free, visible and accessible.
”We now believe we collect 50 per cent of discarded phones and we’re trying for 80 per cent by 2016,” Read says. Ninety per cent of material in mobile phones can be recycled and the energy saved from recycling, as opposed to producing new materials, is a factor of 11 to one, she says.
”The telecommunications industry, which funds the scheme, is very progressive,” Read says. ”It’s done a lot of work in addressing the overall impact of the product and it takes product stewardship seriously over the entire life cycle.”
Read sees education – of both consumers and companies – as crucial to the future of recycling.
”Consumers have a responsibility to ensure their products are recycled, just as manufacturers do. We all get a benefit from the product, so everyone has a role to play in product stewardship. It’s a partnership.”
With the success of voluntary schemes and the advent of legislation to begin covering the gaps, Gray sees product design as the next recycling frontier.
”Businesses are making money out of things like TVs and computers and this legislation is designed to put the cost of recycling on to the companies selling them. This will put pressure on manufacturers to design products with this [future recycling] in mind.”
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