E-Waste Recycling Event Returning To Forest Park On Sunday

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — State and city officials, alongside Community Board 10, will host an electronics recycling event for the first time this year in Forest Park on Sunday, May 2.

The e-waste recycling event, which is hosted in partnership with the Lower East Side Ecology Center, will take place in the Forest Park Bandshell parking lot from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for electronic waste recycling.

The bi-annual event was last held in October 2020, and this time around it will be a drive-through, in order to adhere to COVID-safety protocols, said the news release.

Event attendees will drive into the parking lot and volunteers will remove e-waste items from their cars. In order to make this process easier, the event organizers suggest keeping drop-off items in an easily accessible part of the car, like the backseat or trunk.

Everyone who attends the event is required to wear masks in the parking lot, and people who want to leave their cars will need to have their temperatures taken and fill out a health screening questionnaire — including their name, phone number, email address — for contact tracing purposes, per the NYC Parks Department requirements, since the drop-off is being held at a city park.

One of the event co-hosts, State Senator Joseph P. Addabbo, Jr., who represents New York’s 15th District, including parts of Forest Hills, described the drop-off as a way for nearby Queens residents to “properly and safely recycle their electronics right in their own neighborhood.”

“With recycling laws changing seemingly all the time — and with the Department of Sanitation still recovering from budget cuts due to the COVID pandemic — it can be confusing to know what is allowed to be recycled curbside,” he explained, noting that the pandemic halted the NYC Department of Sanitation’s e-waste appointment recycling program, which isn’t set to return until July.

Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar, who represents New York’s 38th District, where Forest Park is located, and is also co-hosting the event, pointed out that “the United States produces millions of tons of electronic waste each year, which creates health and environmental hazards” and that this event is one way to “do some spring cleaning and at the same time protect the earth” by properly disposing of e-waste.

This electronics drop-off will be the second recycling event in Forest Park that State Senator Addabbo and Assemblywoman Rajkumar have organized in the past two weeks, following an event on Sunday April 25 where more than 100 cars came to shred personal documents and donate goods to veterans, according to a news release.

Here’s a list of the items that can and cannot be recycled at the e-waste event this weekend:

Electronics that will be accepted during the event are:
Computers (laptops & desktops, servers, mainframes);
Monitors (CRT and flat screen);
Handheld devices (smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, e-readers, etc.);
Network devices (routers, hubs, modems, etc.);
Peripherals (keyboards, mice, cables, cords, chargers, etc.);
Components (hard drives, CD-ROMs, circuit boards, power supplies, etc.);
Printers under 50 pounds, scanners, fax-machines, etc.;
TVs, VCRs, DVRs, DVD & Blu-ray Players;
Digital Converter Boxes, Cable/Satellite Receivers;
Audio-visual equipment (cameras, microphones, etc.);
Video-game consoles and accessories;
Cell phones, pagers, PDAs.

Items that will NOT be accepted are:
Batteries of any kind;
Floppy disks/VHS tapes/CDs/DVDs/cassette tapes;
Stereo equipment;
Landline phones/answering machines;
Extension cords;
Smoke detectors;
Any hazardous materials or paint;
Household appliances.

For more information or questions about what items can be recycled, you can contact State Senator Addabbo’s office at 718-738-1111.