California Electronic Asset Recovery (CEAR) Voulenteering

The things I’ve learned since the class began been eye-opening and alarming, to say the least: Earth is in trouble, folks. We’re consuming and wasting our resources faster that the planet can produce them. The industrialized world is especially guilty of the pollution and exploitation. As we do, new solutions pop up to help preserve what we have. Electronics in particular have been a scourge to the earth. They’re cheap to produce, and now that they’re designed to be disposed of when they break, they’re just as easy to simply to toss in a landfill somewhere. That’s how they have been handled. But – surprise!—those electronics leak harmful chemicals into our ground water. Some of them have toxic elements. We had to think of something better.In came Sacramento’s own California Electronic Asset Recovery program in 2003. This is what they do in their own words: “Our purpose is to provide environmentally sound, innovative and economic electronic waste recycling solutions to our community.” Their recycling has removed hundreds of tons of electrical waste from landfills. So, as a school project and an attempt at being part of the solution, I chose to volunteer with this company on one of their collection events. This page chronicles that attempt. Honesty, we need more companies like this. Companies that can be innovative and resourceful. Ones that will help our generation shake up the wasteful status quo.