Local communities from nine countries spanning five continents, joined Sims Recycling Solutions to celebrate Earth Day, by taking part in the world’s first ever international e-waste collection event.

Joining the one billion people around the globe already taking part in Earth Day activities, over 2000 people participated. They cleared out unwanted or broken items of electrical and electronic equipment to be responsibly recycled, completely free of charge.

The events took place over Earth Day weekend at electronics waste recycling facilities in North America, Austria, Belgium, Germany, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden and the UK with a total of 225.4 metric tons of e-waste collected and diverted from landfill.

The purpose of the Earth Day collection events was to promote awareness of the need to recycle redundant electrical and electronic equipment.

"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," said Sims Recycling Solutions’ Global CEO, Graham Davy. "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."

At Sims in Ballito, South Africa, 240 people turned out with their e-waste and held a beach clean-up. Local schools also entered a competition to win refurbished PCs.

In North America, 25 Earth Day events were held, 472,985 pounds of electronic waste was collected and over 1300 people dropped off material.

In the UK, four events were held.  A survey was also carried out to assess levels of awareness of e-waste recycling in the area.

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 in partnership with Sims’ local waste management company and a competition was held to guess the weight of the material collected.
 
In Germany, Sims donated 1 Euro for every kilo of e-waste collected, providing a donation of 5000 Euros to a local school to buy computer equipment.
 
In Austria, Sims donated 1500 Euros to the local kindergarten amounting to 5 Euros per kg collected.