We measure our success by the triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit and one of the most significant initiatives that was part of our commitment to Planet was our eWaste recycling program. As part of our series on the history of Small Dog Electronics, I want to give you the story of how that started and evolved. We were not always so conscious of the dangers of electronic waste. In fact, we purchased truckloads of discontinued electronics and accessories and would sort through them to find the products we could sell and those that were obsolete, damaged or otherwise waste. Back then we would simply take those products and put them into the dumpster. We were working with our friends at Marketing Partners in Burlington and the question was asked: “Do you know the dangers of this electronic waste?”
We quickly educated ourselves and found problems. Lead, mercury, and other dangerous materials were in these products that were ending up at the dump and properly recycling these products involved vetting recyclers to ensure these products were not simply shipped off to another country where more dangers were apparent. We learned of the e-Stewards pledge for electronic waste recycling and determined to offer our customers a way to make sure their obsolete products were properly recycled. In the beginning, we offered this service for a small per pound fee and had scales at each location to weight the goods.
On Earth Day almost a decade ago, we decided to offer free e-Waste recycling at a 4-hour event at our South Burlington store. We felt that we might get 5 tons of material and carefully budgeted the $5000 for this event. When I arrived an hour early for the 9am start of the event, cars were lined up around the block and down the street. We quickly outstripped our carefully organized plans to load the material into trucks and soon had a gigantic mountain of e-Waste in the parking lot. Instead of the 5 tons that we anticipated we got over 50 tons!!! Instead of $5000 it cost us $25,000 but it was an incredibly uplifting event for us, for our customers, and for the planet. Over the next several years we held similar events, each one growing larger until our final event (held down the road at the high school) netted us over 150 tons and we had cars backed up all the way onto Interstate 89.
We do not do events now, but still offer free recycling at our stores. We had worked with Vermont’s legislature and Vermont passed one of the most comprehensive e-Waste bills in the nation. This made e-Waste recycling free and easy for all Vermonters. Our successful e-Waste initiative also caught the eye of Apple and other independent Apple resellers and our later events were fully supported by Apple and we feel we made at least a small contribution to addressing this very serious problem!
We have continued our commitment to protecting the planet with conversion to LED lighting in our offices and warehouse and the construction of a solar array at our Waitsfield headquarters that provides 100% of the electricity needs of the South Burlington store and about 80% of the Waitsfield load.
Happy Earth Day!