The Coles County Regional Development and Planning Commission will host an electronics recycling drive on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. or earlier if the trucks provided are filled.

The drive will take place at the leaf and limb drop off site, at 1200 Madison Ave. in Charleston.

Sarah Mummel, the Solid Waste Coordinator for Coles County, asked those who will drop off electronics to enter from the north via Old State Road to help alleviate any traffic congestion.

The drive will accept a large manner of electronic devices, including video game consoles, electronic mice and keyboards, televisions, printers, fax machines, cable receivers and more.

There is a $5 charge and a limit of seven for each television or monitor brought into the drive.

This is the second electronics recycling drive that the commission has planned, Mummel said.

The event is able to take place because of funding provided by the Consumer Electronics Recycling Act, or CERA law in Illinois, which essentially puts the cost of transportation for recycling electronics back onto the manufacturers.

Mummel said that this was something the group had been looking to do previously but were unable to because of the high cost of renting semi-trucks to haul the electronics to a recycling facility.

“I guess the reason why I was really pushing for this was definitely caused by the CERA law because it cut our costs,” Mummel said.

The CERA law allows them to more easily streamline the process as it cuts transportation costs, and the state automatically pairs them with a contractor when they opted into the program

As the Solid Waste Coordinator, it is Mummel’s responsibility to organize drives like this, and “to help the residents of Coles County be able to recycle or dispose of certain kinds of waste in ways that they really wouldn’t be able to normally,” Mummel said.

The previous drive took place at Lake Land Community College in late April. At the event, 65,429 pounds of electronics from people’s homes was collected, with 445 households serviced and nearly 1,000 televisions and monitors being received, Mummel said.

Zoë Donovan can be reached at 581–2812 or at [email protected]