Where to Recycle Electronics in Michigan?

Are you a Michigan business trying to figure out the best way to handle your e-waste? Don’t let it pile up forever. Limit your liability and have your electronics properly recycled and your data properly destroyed with a certified e-recycler. Sadoff will help you explore what that means, what the Michigan laws are, and who you should count on.

Michigan E-Recycling Laws

Michigan, like many other states, actually forces manufacturers to provide avenues for recycling the electronics they produce. This means if you buy a TV today, ten years from now, you can recycle it free of charge. This law went into effect back in 2008 and is still the case today.

Not only does this law give you an easy way to recycle your electronics, but it also makes it illegal to dispose of electronics by other means. You cannot throw a laptop in your recyclable bin or even your trash bin. We’ll go into why and what the law says about businesses.

Why Shouldn’t You Throw Old Electronics in the Trash?

There are two primary scenarios at play here. First, let’s start with the recycling bin. You want to recycle your electronics, so you think you are doing your part by throwing it in the recycling bin. Wrong. Not only is this illegal, but when materials that are not easily recyclable such as paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, or aluminum, end up in a recycling facility, at best it can cause a slowdown, at worst it can damage machinery, contaminate other recyclable goods, or even start a fire.

You decide to throw it in the trash instead. Best case scenario, this means your electronics—which contain heavy metals—end up in a landfill. Landfills are more than just simple dumping spots, under the surface there is a tremendous amount of pressure and even heat, combine that with being exposed to the elements and you have a recipe for those heavy metals to leach out of the electronics where they can potentially contaminate soil, groundwater, and even the atmosphere.

3 Ways You Can Reduce Your E-Waste as a Company

Can Michigan Businesses Take Advantage of Free E-Recycling?

The free e-recycling program in Michigan—as with most states that have similar programs—does not provide free e-recycling to businesses. If you are a business, you will have to find another business that will handle your e-recycling for you. This is perhaps for the best because something that often goes hand-in-hand with e-recycling, especially for business, is data destruction.

Do You Need an E-Recycling Service For Your Data?

Free e-recycling programs often do not handle your data in any special way. This means that any data sent through one of these free services puts your data at risk. A data breach, especially one caused by physical theft of data, can be costly and could even be the end of your business.

At Sadoff, we will remove any data devices from the e-recycling stream so that they can be handled appropriately and to your wishes. We can do physical destruction with a specially designed and certified hard-drive shredder, we can perform overwriting, and we can perform degaussing. All of these go far above and beyond what a hard drive format can do.

Read More: Why is Hard Drive Formatting Not Enough

Sadoff Can Provide E-Recycling and Data Destruction to Michigan Businesses

Sadoff is based in the Midwest with multiple facilities in Wisconsin and in Nebraska, but we provide our services nationwide and that includes our Michigan neighbors to the North and East. We are R2 certified and we are i-SIGMA members which means we follow the best standards for both e-recycling and data destruction. What’s more, when you work with us, we 100%  contractually own liability. You can get a quote on our e-recycling and data destruction services online. Reach out today!

Categorized in: E-Recycle