Recycle your computer - Kelowna

Recycle the easy way…

Computers sure are great when they are working. But what do you do with that computer, monitor, printer, switch, router that no longer works or is just too old? You do what millions of people and companies are doing and store them somewhere in the deepest darkest corner of your house or office. Or you recycle it.

In British Columbia, all new electronics are charged an environmental handling fee. This fee is collected to help offset the costs of recycling your old electronics. Recycle? Does this mean they take my old computer and give it to someone? No, all the electronics contain valuable metals like, copper and gold. Of course these are in small amounts, but still worth value on the market once you have collected it from thousands of electronics. In B.C. electronics are taken to Trail, where they are broken down, melted down and all the salvageable metals, plastics and such are separated and recycled.

What about the hard drive? We recommend that you never take a hard drive to be recycled until the piece is rendered useless and no data can be extracted in anyway. Sometimes formatting the hard drive is not enough. At Northern Computer, we physically take the hard drive apart and scratch the surface of the platters, or even bend and smash them with a hammer. This is the pretty much the only way to make sure you cannot get any data off.

Where do you take all this stuff? The regional district holds a once or twice a year collection, but if you can’t wait for that, you can drop off your electronics at Battery Doctor on Windsor Road in Kelowna. There is no fee to do this, you can contact them to make sure what you want to drop off is accepted as some larger printers or copiers may not be accepted by them.

You can also visit the Encorp website, they are the company responsible to collect all recyclables in B.C. go to http://www.encorp.ca/ for more information.

- Ken H, Account Manager

Northern Computer - Your Trusted Partner
 #1 - 495 Banks Road Kelowna, BC V1X 6A2
Phone: 250.762.7753 Fax: 250.861.1861 Toll-Free: 1.877.257.2896
Email: sales@northerncomputer.ca or service@northerncomputer.ca
Web: http://www.northerncomputer.ca/