Japanese Electronics Giants Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba announced plans to participate in a massive electronics program last week. The corporations will be joining forces with Manufacturers Recycling Management LLC in creating a national recycling infrastructure for their products via a 50 state rollout of recycling centers by January of 2009. The first phase of the program will start of this month in California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin expanding to the rest of the nation throughout next year.

This is a very important program to eliminate the industrial waste of components within our electronic items. Landfills and conventional recycling programs across the country simply do not have the resources of know how to properly handle the complicated components in our laptops, stereos, televisions and boom boxes. Worse yet, many programs which advertise that they will in fact “recycle” these items, actually ship them to impoverished countries for disadvantaged people to try and salvage small amounts of gold and other substances out of them by hand, an unsafe practice which is causing a human health crisis around the world.

You can takepart in responsible corporate recycling or electronic items by supporting the Electronic Takeback Coalition.

LINKS:

Panasonic: Electronics Recycling

Greenbiz.com: Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba launch electronics recycling company

engadget: Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba form recycling partnership