Business recycling event next week
August 6, 2008
By Emily Keller
Businesses in Sammamish will have their annual opportunity to recycle everything from cardboard to computers next week.
The city will sponsor a business recycling collection event from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. August 13 at Eastlake High School, 400 228th Avenue Northeast.
Paul Devine, an organizer for the event, said the collection is designed for businesses to get rid of items that accumulate in small quantities, like wood pallets and fluorescent light bulbs.
“A lot of smaller companies would say I have this waste stream or that waste stream and I don’t know what to do with it. I would go and they might have a pile of cardboard or a few computer monitors,” Devine said about the impetus for the event.
Devine is general manager of Olympic Environmental Resources, an organization whose main focus is organizing the event annually for Sammamish and eight other cities.
Sara Ninteman, an administrative assistant for the city, said the event is especially important since recycling services are limited in Sammamish and the nearest recycling facility is in Factoria.
“What has happened for a lot of the businesses in the area, especially in the strip mall location, is their property managers don’t provide recycling so this has become really important for business to recycle some odd things,” Ninteman said.
The collection began in 2002 with 50-60 participating businesses. That grew to 90-100 businesses and a total collection of 8,000 pounds of recyclables in 2007, Devine said.
The event helps city business people to comply with an October 1, 2005 ban against the disposal of electronics in the regular trash. It is paid for with grants from the King County Solid Waste Division and the Washington State Department of Ecology. The event costs $4-5,000 to put on, Devine said.
Businesses can bring cardboard, compact discs, floppy discs, video tapes, cellular phones, hard drives and other computer components, fluorescent lights, scrap metal, untreated scrap wood, shopping bags and other plastics.
Organizers send the items to a variety of regional recycling facilities. The pallets go to Glacier Recycle in Auburn for grinding. The metal items are sent to Seattle Iron and Metals Corp. Computer monitors, refrigerators and other items that contain chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, go to Total Reclaim in Seattle.
Plastics go to Avoco Plastics Corp. in Auburn. Toner cartridges and cell phones go to Ecco Recycles, which is also in Auburn.
Devine said his organization holds the event just for businesses since Sammamish residents already have two opportunities per year to drop off their recyclables. The city holds those events in the fall and spring, and businesses are prohibited from participating.
Devine said offices often produce the same types of waste regardless of the type of their business. “The big ticket these days is the computer equipment. People are upgrading every two years,” Devine said.
Fees will be charged for some items, and those funds go to the applicable recycling companies. There is a $10 fee for computers and their components, a $25 fee for scrap metal such as chairs, desks, refrigerators, copiers and telephones, and a $20-30 fee for television sets, depending on their size.
Hazardous waste like paint and chemicals will not be accepted.
For more information call 206-938-8262 or visit www.govlink.org/hazwaste/business.
Reporter Emily Keller can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 242, or ekeller@isspress.com.
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