UT partners with alumni to recycle old electronics

RecycleMania, blackout contests and projects at the Scott Park Campus of Energy and Innovation are not the only "green" initiatives at the University of Toledo.

UT is also partnering with a Sylvania company called Affinity Information Management to recycle its old electronics.

Dan Royer, the day supervisor in the building services department at UT, said UT has been recycling its electronics through AIM for approximately six months.

"Basically they take anything with a cord or a circuit board," he said.

Chuck Small, vice president of AIM and UT alumnus, said the goal is to be a "solution provider."

"This partnership is to aid in helping the university find ways to be more Earth-friendly," Small said. "If 10 printers need to be taken out of [Stranahan Hall], just call us."

Royer said one benefit of partnering with AIM is the company comes directly to campus to pick up old electronics.

"What we used to do prior to this was we'd have to sort and separate all the different components and we would crate all that stuff up, shrink wrap all of that, which took a lot of labor on our part," he said. "[With AIM] you just call a number, talk to the gentleman and tell them exactly where they're located and they come right on site."

Computers need to be recycled instead of dumped into landfills because there are large quantities of heavy metals in older monitors, which can cause severe damage to the environment, according to Aaron Flynn, director of academic client services for the Health Science Campus IT department.

"Even though [computers] are a small percent of stuff in landfills, they contain a large percent of heavy metals," Small said.

According to Flynn, some of the metals present in computer monitors that are dangerous to the environment are cadmium, mercury, lead, phosphorus and barium.

"The proper disposal of equipment is the main thing," he said.

According to Small, the danger of having computers in landfills is the possibility those metals would move from landfills into local water streams and pollute drinking water sources.

"It's good for the Earth and we're saving it from going to the landfill. We're able to reuse some of the materials. Some of them are remade into other things and used for a variety of applications," Royer said.

According to Small, AIM takes the computers from the pickup site and ships them to two different places where the computers are ground-up and recyclables such as gold, silver, steel and certain types of plastic are separated and sold to manufacturers.

Flynn said AIM only picks up computers that are "decommissioned by the university," meaning they are the oldest and most out of date.

"These computers are the bottom of the line. Basically, they are retired," he said.

Small said AIM started with on-site paper shredding of confidential documents.

Small said he formed AIM two years ago with three partners, two of which also attended UT.

Small said he started to realize over time that there was a high demand for hard drive destruction and eventually began recycling computers at AIM.

According to Royer, Small proposed the partnership to recycle the old computers.

"What we focused on is that three of the four co-founders are associated with UT," Small said.