It started out as a complaint in 2014 about an unregistered electronics recycler with a pile of televisions behind their place of business. It ended with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2020 spending over $1 million to clean up over 1.2 million pounds of crushed television tubes left in a warehouse. This was the first hint that the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan was underserved when it came to electronics recycling.
Now, after multiple years of grants and cooperative efforts between the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy’s (EGLE’s), Materials Management Division (MMD), local environmental groups, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and several communities, there are nine state-supported permanent collection locations and four retailer supported collection sites in the Upper Peninsula.
“After seeing a warehouse full of gaylord boxes of broken television tubes, I knew there had to be a way to make sure that U.P. residents had access to properly recycling their unwanted electronics,” said Steve Noble, EGLE’s electronics recycling specialist.
Small grants were the answer. The grants started with sponsoring electronics collection events in several communities throughout the U.P. and grew into setting up permanent collection locations. The effort grew through building private and public partnerships such as those with Bay Mills, Hannahville, and the Keweenaw Bay Indian communities.
Add in a relationship with a couple local waste services companies, a large environmental group with a passion to support environmental protection efforts, the support of a non-profit retailer known to repurpose and resell almost anything, and you have a successful formula for building a network of collection sites and collection events. This results in around 400,000 pounds of unwanted electronics being collected and properly recycled every year from locations in the U.P.
“The U.P. collection network continues to operate through the support of small EGLE, MMD grants and contracts,” Noble added. “Because of the rural nature of the U.P., it is difficult to collect trailer loads of material in any one location. So, the economics of collecting electronics is a challenge. EGLE support keeps the collection of the electronics affordable for residents and small businesses that use the service. Otherwise, simply due to the cost, the material would end up in one of the landfills across the U.P.”
All the material collected at the nine EGLE-supported collection locations are handled through a state contract with a nationally certified electronics recycler. The recycler follows proper data sanitization protocol and is inspected annually by a third-party auditing firm to assure compliance with environmental regulations.
In addition to the 13 permanent collection locations, EGLE grants support multiple community collection events across the U.P. The environmental group handles events in the middle and western portions of the UP, while an electronics recycler based in Sault Ste Marie, supports collection events in the Eastern UP.