Thank you SO much to all of our amazing volunteers and to everyone who came out and ethically recycled their e-waste this past weekend!
During the drive the parking lot of Cedarbrook Elementary School, normally empty on a weekend, was crowded with people and piled high with “e-waste” –old computers, TVs, radios, stereo equipment, toasters, and other used electronics that had reached the end of their useful lives.
Over the course of the weekend, over 150 families brought old electronics by the carload and paid $1 per pound to have them recycled ethically.
By Sunday afternoon, over 11,000 pounds of used electronics were packed up for shipping to facilities that will redistribute the use-able items to people who can use them, harvest working parts from broken components, and forward unsalvageable items to carefully chosen U.S. operations that recycle e-waste in accordance with the highest international standards (more information at www.ban.org). Over the past two years, TTF has helped to ethically recycle over 50,000 pounds of e-waste!
The-waste drive is the brainchild of Christopher Swain (pictured above), the first person in history to swim the entire lengths of several dirty waterways including the Columbia River, the Charles River, the Hudson River, and Lake Champlain to raise awareness about clean water issues. Cheltenham a stop on the way for Swain, who is currently swimming 1000 miles down the Atlantic coast from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Washington, DC. The ocean swim is part of his TOXTOURTM project (www.toxtour.org), an ongoing campaign to collect and recycle, ethically, one billion pounds of e-waste, to prevent toxic chemicals and heavy metals from fouling the world’s waterways and ecosystems.
A special thanks to our hard working crew from Arcadia University!
You can view more photos from the event in our Facebook album.
