With the rise of digital technology, something else has risen simultaneously: piles of unusable electronics, sitting around and gathering dust.

Thankfully, North Penn’s Environment Action club, ENACT, offers a solution.  Every fall, they hold an annual Electronics Recycling Drive.

This year, it will be Saturday, November 9th, from 10AM-1PM, in the S parking lot at North Penn High School.

Mr. John Collier, advisor of the ENACT Club welcomes both community members and students to enjoy the Drive.

For free, devices such as phones, keyboards, wires and cords, players, computers, and much, much more can be taken out of the basement or junk drawer, and given a continued life.

At the Drive, the process is simple.  

“Community members come in, they don’t have to get out of their car.  Someone will ask what you have, and will assess whether there’s a fee or not, then we’ll empty everything out of the car with our volunteers… and then you drive on your way,” Collier explained.

There are a handful of items with fees, mainly CRT or flatscreen TVs and monitors, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, microwaves.  Additionally, large appliances such as refrigerators and stoves are not allowed.

Student volunteers “will be unloading the cars, some people will be directing traffic, and some people will be sorting the electronics”.

The Drive is run hand in hand with PAR Recycleworks.  Besides just recycling what is collected at the drive, they do another important job.  PAR actually stands for People Advancing Reintegration.  By hiring formerly incarcerated people, they allow for more than just electronics to be given a new life.

At PAR’s facility, “all of the computer stuff, they disassemble onsite and they sort of ship that out to different companies that are going to take the different types of scrap from it… basically, the electronics are getting disassembled into their simplest components…. A lot of what they’re looking for is the metal, and the glass, and the materials that can easily and cost effectively be made into something new,” Collier said.

The impact of the drive is enormous.

“We have hundreds of cars every year, and tens of thousands of pounds every year… We’re usually between 10,000 and 30,000 pounds depending on the year… it’s ridiculous!” Collier said.

While an old laptop might not mean much to one person, the fact that it’s being recycled has a great impact.

“For electronics specifically, they tend to have a lot of rare metals that had to be harvested somewhere in the world,” Collier said.  “Broadly speaking, recycling is good because it takes energy and resources to make anything we use.  So if we could instead take something that we already dug out of the ground, harvested, whatever, and make it into something new, that’s typically less energy intensive and less impactful on the environment.”

This year, take advantage of ENACT’s Electronics Drive, and turn trash into treasure.