 I'm Leslie McVane. Welcome to Portland Media Center member highlight. Today my guest is Chelsea Malachara who's the sustainability education outreach coordinator for the University of Southern Maine. Welcome. Hi thanks for having me. Yeah so you've got a big event coming up and it's what year seven I think? Yeah so this year April 20th from 8 to 12 is our annual free electronic waste recycling day. It's our seventh year so you're correct on that and it's a collaboration between the City of Portland, the University of Southern Maine North Coast Services which is the entity that takes all the electronic waste and then just some community members so it's a really great experience and an event that happens every year. In the last several years we've actually had the Portland Sea Dogs mascot slugger come and give out free tickets to people to go to the game later that day and so it's just kind of a fun community event but also really good for the environment and for human health. Right and it's an education chance opportunity to let people know what can be recycled and what can't be recycled. Exactly. And in this day and age I mean in the old days you had a telephone and you had that telephone for life. You had a TV and you had it for 50 years. Exactly. Now technology's changing so fast we end up with all this stuff we don't use and we don't know what to do with. So do you want to talk a little bit about what people can bring on that 20th? Yeah for sure so to kind of start off I'd love to just give a little background about why we even have an electronic waste recycling day and why people can't just throw their electronics in the trash and that's two parts. So the first part is electronic waste has a lot of different toxic substances in it so lithium, lead, mercury all things we don't want in the environment and also pose a threat to human health as well but then we also but electronic waste also has some very valuable materials in it that are environmentally intensive to mine but also are very valuable to reuse. So there's high value plastics and metals like copper, silver, and gold so we take all of that and recycle it responsibly and if those were to end up in the landfill they'd pose a risk to human health and have an environmental impact. So for the electronic waste recycling day we collect things like a laptop, a cell phone, and things like VCRs, DVD players, those old televisions that some people still have in their basement, new televisions. There's a whole list of things on our website which I can talk about later but those are kind of the primary things that people bring but you can also bring things like computer monitors and keyboards and mice and what not. But not larger appliances. Not larger appliances. Yep so things like refrigerators and ovens we don't want those but we also don't want things with refrigerants in them so that includes air conditioning units which are really popular people are like oh I'm getting ready for summer and then they wonder what to do with that and the because of freon in it the freon in it yeah so but the most common things that people do bring that we don't want are batteries and then any kind of light bulb. Okay so what do people do with those? So two things so batteries the alkaline batteries so just your typical battery can actually according to if your waste goes to eco-main you can actually throw them in the trash to be incinerated because they're not it's not harmful. I mean eco-main has scrubbers to scrub out the harm in it but you don't have to do anything special but light bulbs should be you can recycle re-recycle them at Home Depot or bring them to different drop-off locations and eco-main actually has this great app called Recyclopedia that I use a lot personally but also we use a lot at the university to figure out okay where do these different we try to tell our students and our staff and faculty to figure out where things go when they're at home yeah so because I know with light bulbs I don't know what to do with them so that I just put them aside and then I'm I keep reaching for them when I change a light bulb I'm like no that's a bad one yeah now I can look up where I can take them yeah I was actually looking for those for some samples at home and I found that I still had a whole barrel full of light bulbs I just haven't gotten rid of so we don't want those but there is a if you look up online the main DEP website Department of Environmental Protection also has a whole list of the product stewardship program so another thing we don't want are mercury containing thermostats which actually can get a $5 rebate for returning those and yeah anything they're like I said there's a whole list online of everything but those are the most common things that people will bring but people can go and check before they come in and that's on the 20th from from 8 to 12 8 to 12 will there be people there helping you unload your car if you thought of stuff that's a great question so we it's a very well oiled machine seven years later so you just drive up you don't even have to get out of your car and we have folks who come you tell us what you know what the items are that you need removed if they're in your trunk or your back seat we'll take them away and then the other really unique and and something I'm really proud of piece of this event is that we accept donations because we're collecting all these things for free and so accept donations every year for a different organization or charity and this year we're collecting donations for the usm student emergency fund so it's something that usm set up the usm foundation set up to help students who are in emergent situations that might prevent them from continuing school or missing classes or you know unforeseen you know fees for books or something like that so they can apply to this and so all the donations this year are going to go towards that and last year we raised about $1400 to go towards cultivating community so I'm excited and and and so that's a really unique kind of cool piece to this event as well it's terrific now you talk about doing responsible recycling and you mentioned the name of the the organization that takes these things to recycle tell us a little bit about that and what they do I mean we see pictures of children in dumps in Guatemala or China or somewhere pulling out the things and it's very dangerous to do that so how do they do this recycling yeah that's a great question and I don't I'll be honest I don't know the full process of what happens to everything but I would say a large portion of the items that we collect from this event are essentially mined if you will so all the metals and valuable plastics are taken out those are recycled or sold to places that will make them into something new and then the the date hazardous pieces are disposed of according to main state law so again something that you could find on the main DEP website but is it a local company that does yeah north coast services they're new england based and they do like south portlands e-waste recycling event and a lot of other southern and just just general main recycling events so they're very reputable yeah I think it's wonderful you do this every year and you could probably do it more than once a year and and still get a load of stuff yeah I'm sure you've talked about that yeah the first year that we did this event so seven years ago we collected 80,000 pounds of electronic waste now last year we collected 25,000 pounds but more communities are doing this so we're getting less you know folks from buxton or gore or windom coming down because they have their own their own way but well and I don't know if you've been watching that tv show with the Japanese woman who's telling you to to cleanse your home and get rid of things and that the donations to goodwill and all that have gone up like 100% so I'm thinking that you may get quite a crowd on the 20th of April that's a great point yeah I didn't even think of that but we have been usually in the beginning of March we already have people emailing and calling us saying I hope you're doing it again this year I did a big you know basement clean out this winter and this spring and I'm planning you know planning to bring bang so yeah well I know April is when I plan to clean out my basement and my garage and I know there are things that I can be bringing on the 20th so great thank you so much is there anything else that we should let our audience know um well like I said if you want more information in a full list of what we accept we um you can just visit usm.main.edu slash sustainability and at the bottom of the page there's uh an events section and our event is there so it has a full list and you'll see posters around town and if you follow the office of sustainability on facebook we have an event page for that and also all the other events that we do around the year so it sounds wonderful thank you so much for all you do yeah thank you so much for having me