A lot of appreciative Adams County residents stopped by the Hastings Solid Waste Landfill to drop off electronic waste for free last week.
The landfill played host to an electronics collection and recycling event all day Friday and for four hours on Saturday.
“Everything went extremely smooth,” said Jack Newlun, the city’s solid waste superintendent. “Traffic flows were great.”
The city hired The Retrofit Companies out of Owatonna, Minnesota, which has done the event several times in the past.
The event filled 47 Gaylord pallets — large cardboard boxes — which amounts to about 43,000 pounds of electronic waste, or about two full semitrailers. Each trailer holds 26 pallets.
Newlun said he feels good about those numbers.
“For a day-and-a-half event, the numbers were way up,” he said. “The public was very excited and appreciative of the program. The recycler from Minnesota said that was ‘a very good and worthwhile event’ as far as the number count. I was very happy.”
The recycler accepted free of charge up to three laptop computers, three computer hard drives, three computer monitors, three LED or tube televisions, and six fluorescent lamps 8 feet or less.
The event was funded by a $20,000 Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy Waste Reduction and Recycling Incentive Grant Program.
Kerry Nygren, truck driver for The Retrofit Companies, helped facilitate traffic flow. He told each person dropping off electronic waste they were “the next contestant on ‘The Price Is Right’ ” as they drove up to the dropoff point. The Retrofit Companies had two more employees there to remove old computers and televisions from trunks and truck beds.
Greg Schneider of Hastings dropped off an old tube television on Friday morning that had been sitting idle probably 15 years.
“I thought it was an opportunity to get rid of the old TV,” he said of the recycling event. “It gave me the impetus to get it done. Otherwise it might still sit in my living room for another five years.”
He’d cleaned rooms a few years prior and had to pay to dispose the electronic waste.
“This was a carrot on the top,” Schneider said. “Why wouldn’t I come out today to do this?”
He was appreciative someone else was there to remove the television from the bed of his pickup.
“It was nice they had somebody to take it out for me because I struggled yesterday getting it in,” he said.
Marie Magadan, logistics and customer service manager for The Retrofit Companies, said she’s heard from communities where The Retrofit Companies helps with recycling events that the communities have problems with electronic waste littered in parks and ditches, which could lead to hazardous materials leaking into the ground.
“Somebody’s eventually going to be cleaning it up,” she said. “So, I think it’s important for different communities to have these events to have an outlet to dispose it.”
From Hastings, the truckloads go to The Retrofit Companies processing site in Little Canada, Minnesota. There, the electronic waste is sorted.
“Each waste stream might to be processed in a different way,” Magadan said.
The Retrofit Companies partnered with electronics processer Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations of Onalaska, Wisconsin.
Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations clears the computers’ content and then shreds the computers.
Batteries and other hazardous materials are removed before going into the shredder.
Magadan said a lot of communities canceled recycling events in 2020. The next year was still slow.
“It’ll be interesting to see the volumes we get this year,” she said.
Rick Thompson of Hastings also brought a television.
“It’s a great service; I really appreciate it,” he said.
He moved to Hastings in May. He’d heard this event would come up.
“We thought, ‘We don’t know when it’s going to happen, but we’ll be ready just in case,’ ” he said. “It’s nice to get rid of it. It really is. And it’s a great service.”
Ron Fichtner, who lives outside of Hastings, brought three computers and a television.
“I think it is great,” he said of the opportunity to properly dispose of old electronics properly. “That stuff accumulates. I think it’s just a great program and really appreciate it.”
One of the computers hadn’t been used in eight years because it had become outdated and couldn’t handle new programs.
Newlun said recycling event participants were in a good mood for a few reasons.
“I think some of the factors were we had a good traffic flow,” he said. “We had this as a day-and-a-half event where it wasn’t just a few hours where people were rushing in. People could adjust their time.”
There was also decent weather — temperatures were in the 40s and 50s with little wind.
“I think the weather really was in our favor, so that helped,” Newlun said. “I had so many people come up to me and say, ‘We got that old TV that’s been sitting in the basement that we couldn’t even lift, we got it out here.’ ”
Newlun noticed a lot more LED televisions than in past electronic recycling events.
“There’s a lot less of the old tube type,” he said.
He recalled a woman who brought in two flat-screen televisions.
“She said, ‘They just don’t last like they used to,’ ” he said. “So true.”