By Greentech Lead Europe: During the Earth Day weekend,
Sims Recycling Solutions, an electrical and electronics recovery and recycling
company, has collected and diverted total 225.4 tons of e-waste from landfill
through their recycling facilities around the world.
Residents and businesses in nine countries
across four continents have been invited to take part in the world’s first ever
global collection of waste electrical and electronic equipment to support
Global Earth Day 2012.
Over 2000 people from nine countries participated
in this event. They brought unwanted or broken items of electrical and
electronic equipment along to Sims’ electronics recycling facilities, to be
responsibly recycled completely free of charge.
“Our Earth Day message is very simple. We urgently need
to start retrieving a lot more of the finite resources of materials – such as
precious metals – which are contained in electronics waste, than we are doing
at present. By doing this, we can re-use these resources and protect the
environment from the harmful emissions which arise from mining virgin metal ore
or unnecessarily manufacturing new supplies of materials such as plastics,”
said Graham Davy, global CEO, Sims Recycling Solutions.
At South Africa, 240 people dropped their e-waste at Sims
in Ballito and held a beach clean- up. Local schools also entered a competition
to win refurbished PCs provided by Sims Recycling Solutions.
In North
America, 25 Earth Day events were held, 472,985 pounds of electronic waste
was collected and over1300 people dropped off material.
In India,
the Earth Day event was held in a shopping mall in Bangalore, attracting more
than 400 people who were provided with information on e-waste recycling.
In Sweden, the event was held in partnership with Sims’
local waste management company.
In Germany, Sims donated one euro for every kilo of
e-waste collected, providing a donation of 5000 euro to a local school to buy
computer equipment.
In Austria, Sims donated 1500 euro to the local
kindergarten amounting to 5 euro per kg collected.
In the UK, four events took place and a survey was
conducted to measure awareness of e-waste recycling.
All items collected were recycled to the highest
international quality standards at Sims Recycling Solutions facilities around
the world, recovering the precious metals and other materials and sent to
manufacturers to be re-used in making new products.
Recently, Sims Metal Management was designated as one of
the Global Top 100 Most Sustainable Corporations for the fourth year in a row.
The list, compiled by sustainable business publication Corporate Knights, was
announced at the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.