Through a free e-waste collection event at Capital West Event Center, a local Eagle Scout recently kept more than 125 tube televisions from being placed in the landfill.
Logan Mathews, with the help of Boy Scouts Troop 4 and Troop 3004, also collected cellphones, computers, keyboards and printers.
Mathews said he hadn't expected people to donate as many items as they did.
"It really exceeded expectations," he said. "We got more than what we could handle. The recycling company has to come up and make a second trip to get the rest of the stuff that they couldn't get the first time."
Many electronic devices contain toxic substances such as lead, mercury and chromium. When disposed of in a landfill, these toxins leach into the soil and pollute the groundwater and air.
"Those contain so many toxic substances that it can be really harmful to the environment when put in landfills," Mathews said.
However, recycling electronics typically costs money - items such as tube televisions can cost more than $50 to be recycled.
"For a lot of people, it's kind of frustrating trying to recycle electronic devices because you have to pay for it, and so I really liked giving people a way to properly recycle their old devices," Mathews said.
The collected items will now be stripped to the component level and processed to remove the precious metals. The precious metals, and other recyclables such as plastic, will be reused in new devices or for other purposes.
Mathews recently completed a project removing invasive species from Runge Nature Center as his first step to earning the William T. Hornaday Silver Medal, a Boy Scouts award for service in conservation and ecology. The silver medal award requires four projects; this recycling event was part of his next project toward earning the medal.
He also plans to build recycling bins to be placed on Adrian's Island, and he organized a recycling-themed poster contest for seventh- and eighth-grade students in participating schools in Jefferson City. The posters are due Thursday and will be judged shortly after that.
"Recycling in general really has a big impact on how much stuff we put in landfills, and it also keeps us from having to extract more materials from the earth," Mathews said. "Just being able to reuse things has a big impact on energy consumption and pollution and all kinds of things."