City Of Tulsa Launches E-Waste Recycling Service

The city of Tulsa has recently launched a new E-waste recycling service at all of its park community centers.

People can bring in small electronics such as old landline phones, old cell phones, speakers, and printers among others so that they can be recycled properly.

A lot of those items contain batteries or wires which can contaminate the recycling stream. This is especially true in the case of batteries that contain acid that can have a negative impact on the environment. Also, when those types of items end up in the regular recycle stream, they have to be filtered out which require time on top of costing money.

"Those items then have to be picked out and sorted because they cannot be generated well enough for steam and so most of the items go to the landfill which contaminate and sit there for years and contaminate the environment," Joshua Noel, Tulsa's community involvement coordinator said.

The Tulsa park community centers will have buckets and bins for anyone to drop off their old electronics and take care of the recycling process for you. Noel said that another reason the city adopted this program was to reduce the city's contamination rate.

"Our contamination rate right now in the city of Tulsa, when it comes to recycling, is very high, and one of the main reasons is because of e-waste. We are trying to lower that contamination the best we can, [we're] coming up with different solutions. So this was one of the solutions that we came up with which was starting a new E-waste service," Noel said.

While smaller electronics will be accepted, Noel said that they will not accept items like TVs, computer monitors, towers, and ink cartridges because they are more difficult to break down and recycle. With the larger items like the TVs and computer monitors, the city also has to pay a fee to recycle them.

If you have any questions about what can and cannot be recycled, you can visit tulsarecycles.com for more information.