ShawneeDispatch.com

It took him about 11 years altogether, but Robert Arnold finally got rid of items taking up space in his house Saturday at Shawnee’s first e-waste recycling event.

Arnold, of Shawnee, recycled a computer’s central processing unit, four monitors, a copier and three printers.

“We’ve moved twice and pushed them to the side,” he said. “We had no place to take them. You couldn’t just dump them. I saw this, and it was just perfect.”

Arnold said his wife found out about the event in the city’s quarterly newsletter “Shawnee CityLine.”

“My wife, she’s had it on the board for a while,” Arnold said. “She said, ‘We’re getting rid of them.’”

So, Arnold was one of the 450 cars that filed through the e-recycling line in the parking lot behind Splash Cove.

In its five hours of operation, about 55,000 pounds of materials were dropped off to be recycled by R3 Technology, 17501 W. 98th St., Lenexa.

When it was first created four years ago, R3 Technology specialized in asset disposition, buying and reselling electronic and technological merchandise as it came out of use from companies, cities and school districts.

About a year ago, the company started to accept just about anything electronic for recycling, and it works with municipalities to offer citywide e-recycling events.

Company president Jim Salleé said Saturday was the company’s seventh or eighth e-recycling event of the spring season, which started off March 1 in Blue Springs, Mo.

To recycle an item, drivers came in through the north entrance of the Splash Cove parking lot. Each car was counted, and those donating monitors and televisions paid fees of $4 and $7.50, respectively. Next a team of volunteers helped the drivers remove the items from their vehicles. Volunteers sorted items based on their type on to pallets that would be loaded on to a large truck and taken to R3 Technology headquarters to be weighed and counted. Before exiting the loop, county representatives asked drivers to stop for a free gasoline cap pressure check to make sure their vehicles weren’t emitting vapors.

“If you’re losing gas this way, it’s about 30 gallons a year,” said Jennifer Logan with the county.

Salleé said the most donated item was monitors, followed by desktop computers and televisions.

“We had a guy come in and bring 60 monitors right off the bat, said assistant city clerk Stephen Powell.

The city tied together the e-recycling event with Tidy Town, a special curbside, large item pick up for items not collected by trash service.

“We’re just trying to push more green initiatives in the cit,y and this is a way to do it at no cost,” Powell said.

After the success of Saturday’s event, Powell said the city would likely continue the event annually, and if the demand is high enough, maybe more than once per year.

“Until we were contacted by R3, we never knew about a company that specialized in this e-recycling events,” he said.

Post a comment

ShawneeDispatch.com doesn't necessarily condone the comments here, nor does it review every post.
Read our full policy. Also, read about banned accounts and harassing comments.

Requires free ShawneeDispatch.com registration.