An eye-opening look at electronic waste & how your office can take action!

Written by Michelle Leung, Member of Symcor’s Green Team and a Living Planet @ Work champion, helping to lead the wave of environmental change at work.
Last week, a group of WWF Living Planet @ Work Champions and I went on a tour of an electronic recycling facility in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The tour was organized by the Living Planet @ Work team to help bring awareness to a new campaign called The Smart Office Challenge! The campaign, developed with HP Canada, helps to engage employees around the energy and waste footprint that comes from office IT equipment including electronic waste (Read more here). Having never been to an electronic recycling facility before, we were certainly in for an awakening!

When we were led into the plant facility, I believe we were all astonished and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of electronic waste that was stored in boxes, wrapped into bales and piled on the plant floor. We saw thousands of batteries, hundreds of keyboards, computer screens, motherboards, wires, pieces of glass (the list could go on)!
If the e-waste collected at this location represents only a tiny percentage of e-waste in the world, it’s hard to imagine the amount that we generate. Not to mention, this is stuff that is recycled responsibly! Imagine how much is going to landfill or possibly being shipped illegally overseas.
Prior to the tour, our guide for the day played a short video clip showing us how countries overseas are polluted with all sorts of e-waste. Streets were lined and piled high and it looked as though houses had sprouted in a landfill. Unbeknownst to many, much electronic waste ends up in developing countries where the cost to ship is low compared to properly recycling the waste.

The facility itself is a fascinating one. Huge machines help to sort and shred waste. Everything has to be properly segregated to ensure the highest grade of material as well as safety. Electronics were either taken apart by hand and / or by large shredding machines. Optical lights in the machines are used to separate the shredded material but manual operators are still required to handpick and further sort the material to ensure quality.
It was reassuring to know that every part of the process at this particular facility (SIMS Recycling Solutions) is audited (by RQO, for example) to ensure that the electronic waste is properly disposed of or recycled. It is what SIMS calls their downstream accountability. Even though there is a cost to such rigorous and responsible processing of e-waste, the environment and health of people in developing countries clearly outweighs this. By hosting e-waste drives and sending it to responsible recycling companies, we are not only helping the environment, but also protecting the livelihood of people from negative effects such as lead poisoning through water contamination caused by improper e-waste disposal.

Until the tour, I don’t think our green team at Symcor fully understood or could fathom the magnitude of work required to recycle our electronics. We were all guilty of having the latest and greatest of technologies and although we took care to responsibly dispose of our old phones, computers and printers, we never realized how much e-waste there could be and what was involved to dispose of it in an environmentally responsible way.

The tour was certainly an eye-opening experience for everyone and it inspired us all to do something! The team was filled with a new sense of urgency to spread the word of electronic waste recycling. We had done it in the past but after the tour, we knew our priority was to educate our employees on the impact of e-waste and how they could help on a global scale by taking action.
WWF’s Living Planet @ Work and HP recently launched a campaign to help companies do this. The new campaign is focused on engaging employees around the energy and waste footprint that comes from using office IT equipment. As part of the campaign, you’re challenged to host an e-waste drive in honour of Waste Reduction Week!  To learn more, click here.