March 2009

Environmental Leadership

Better Batteries

AVW-TELAV's Green Committee is not backing down! Still committed to indentifying areas of concern throughout the company, the Green Committee shifted its focus on to the disposal of batteries. As you know, many of our products, particularly wireless microphone kits, take batteries. In order to ensure our customers never have an issue with dead batteries, they are replaced every show. This means that a lot of batteries end up in landfills. Sadly, most of these batteries still have at least 75% of their power still in them. Therefore, we have set up a program across Canada asking all of our branches to collect these batteries and re-use them. In Ontario, it is necessary to have a Waste Generator’s License to legally dispose of batteries. The Toronto Branch has had such a license for many years, and we routinely fill up a 45 gallon drum with old batteries before we call the waste management company to remove them. This is an expensive process, but one that helps save these toxic batteries from going untreated to landfill.

It occurred to the Green Committee that there may be a way to cut down on the number of batteries we are throwing away, at the same time providing a benefit to our employees. So this summer in Toronto, we had a student go through hundreds of batteries and test them. Any battery that was at 75% or more capacity was set aside. Anything with less power than that was put back into the bin for the recycler.

The “good” batteries were offered to staff to take for free to run calculators, kids’ toys, remote controls etc. We merely asked that when the batteries were exhausted that staff return them to work for us to put in the recycle bin. We also offered to accept any old batteries (not car batteries) for recycling. This has proven to be a very successful program—another win/win for both the employees and the environment.

This is just another great step towards AVW-TELAV's green initiatives that we hope, by sharing, will inspire even greater initiatives from our Meetings in Progress readers.

We all have to work together to make an impact! Does your company have a Green Initiative that you would like to share with the rest of the industry? AVW-TELAV would like to know what your company does to play a role in the world's challenge to conserve energy and reduce waste. We will publish select submissions in Meetings in Progress and attribute all ideas to the organizations that submit them.

Please e-mail trish.richards@avwtelav.com to share your green initiative. Let's make each other our greatest resource for green solutions!