DORVAL – In the lot outside of Ballantyne Park, a seeming conga-line of cars lined up to drop off electronics that cost hundreds and thousands of dollars when they were bought. Residents carried laptops, cell phones, printers, monitors, keyboards, game consoles, and then watched in surprise as a two-man crew took these gizmos and threw them into a metal box in a semi trailer.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Alison Hall, a Dorval graphic designer, as she watched her 24-year-old Macintosh monitor get hurled to the scrap heap.
“It was a special part of my life,” she laughed later on. “But now I’m parting with it. I’ve dealt with it. There’s a box of Kleenex emptied at home.”
Few are so sentimental about old and unused electronics, which are increasingly becoming a problem known as ‘e-waste.’ The Canadian government spends more than $1 billion a year on e-waste, which can be a dangerous source of pollutants like mercury, lead and cadmium.
Recycling e-waste is a painstaking process, according to Marc Gosselin, a contractor who oversaw e-waste recycling at the Dorval site; workers tear apart electronic devices and separate components like batteries, chips and other parts. Those parts are then reused if possible. Usually these gizmos end up becoming doorstops for years before they’re put out of their misery.
“You kind of put it in a corner and ignore it for a while,” laughed Claudette Charron, a Dorval resident who brought in a broken microwave and an old TV.
Most municipalities have recycling drop-off programs that accept e-waste, with information available on their website.
In Beaconsfield, for instance, recycling drop-off runs from April to November. Gosselin estimated that in Dorval, he expected to fill the trailer full of about 24 boxes of about three metres cubed.
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