Recycle Technical Waste

How to do it now!

Purchase recycled products - To complete the recycling loop we need to purchase recycled products. (see our 'Purchase Recycled Goods' action)

Recycle all that you can - Latrobe City Council offers kerbside recycle bins in which to place the following:

• cardboard, milk and juice cartons.
• cardboard boxes, newspapers and magazines.
• glass bottles and jars.
• aluminum cans, foil trays and steel cans.
• plastic milk, juice, soft drink and detergent bottles.
• telephone books, work and school papers, letters, envelopes and advertising material.

You can find more information, including an A-Z Recycling Guide, on the Latrobe City Council website.

Use specialist recyclers of technical waste where available - Most states have directories of specialist recyclers that will take everything from your old paint and oil to your printer cartridges.

• National - Oil Recycling locations
• Victoria - Sustainability Victoria offers a directory of recycling services in Victoria covering most technical products we use in the house.

Recycle dead compact fluorescent globes. The new efficient lightglobes are great, however they contain small amounts of mercury and need to be disposed of in a way that prevents this mercury entering nature, our soil and food.

The Australian Government in partnership with the lighting industry developing Fluoro-cycle, a scheme aimed to increase recycling rates for mercury-containing globes. It is intended to be launched by mid-2010.

Visit the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts pages for more information on the Fluoro-cycle and recycling of light globes

In addition, fluorescent globe processing is carried out in Australia through recycling companies such as Chemsal and CMA Ecocycle.

Recycle your e-waste. Electronic waste also known as “e-waste” , contains toxic and hazardous substances, which when confined to landfill, can leach into the ground water and cause contamination. E-waste is generally defined as any item with a battery or electrical cord (computers, printers, monitors, mobile phones etc.). The proliferation of information technology has led to an increasing need to recycle used or obsolete computing equipment.

E-waste can be recycled, however, before deciding to send your old computer to a recycler, consider donating it to a community group, local charity, school or family member. If you can't usefully pass it on, these organisations will be able to help:

• Recycling Near You (National) - Planet Ark list of recycling locations for e-waste
• ewaste (National) - home or office pick up of your unwanted computers.
• MRI (Aust) - home or office pick up of your unwanted computers.
• Byteback (Victoria) - deposit unwanted computer equipment at a Byteback location.
• Computerbank (Melbourne) - offers cheap refurbished computers to concession card holders.
• Green Collect (Melbourne) – picks up a wide range of items from offices and diverts them from landfill so they can be reused, remade or recycled.

Recycle your mobile phones. For every mobile phone in use, there are two more sitting unused in a draw somewhere! Mobile phones contain nickel, cobalt, cadmium, gold, silver and plastics which can be recycled and re-used. Most mobile phone retailers have recycling boxes. Alternatively, call Mobile Muster for a full list of drop-off locations.

Why this action is important?

In order to reduce the strain our ongoing consumption is putting on the environment, we need to use less and use it many times (ideally, perpetually). Creating closed loops by recycling all that we can moves us in this direction.