Well, I had a great round of emails with a number of you after last month’s issue. Several of you brought up some of our industry’s challenges, and I’d like us to address one of them together today.

We talk a lot about the necessity of our industry to go “green.” But we talk about it mostly in terms of energy consumption, and its effect on climate change. It’s the part of “green” that our clients seem most focused on right now, and the one to which we are responding with spec sheets and wattage figures. Manufacturers in our industry have made huge leaps in power efficiency, and we have the equipment stickers to prove it.

That may be as “green” as the equipment sales end of the business needs to get, since at the end they don’t have the equipment, the client does – and there will usually be several years before the other half of “green” rears its ugly head.

But Ralph Miner of Sound Vision Audio Visual brought up the other half of being environmentally conscious, and one which we in the rental and staging end of the business need to deal with better before clients, especially regular government and corporate clients, begin to ask.

Since WE are the holders and end users of the equipment, how do we dispose of it?

Our equipment, especially that which is a few years old, is LOADED with toxic chemicals. And used electronics are becoming the “hot potato” of the business.

For many years, there was a GREAT way to get rid of it, and it was one of the key things that made the rental business the most profitable (percentage-wise) part of audiovisual. We SOLD it. I can remember the days when four-year-old fully-depreciated equipment could sell for real money… meaning that every piece added nicely to our profit margin when we got rid of it. In fact, the unit’s eventual sale was something we planned for, and even budgeted for.

I spent several years as a photographer, briefly professionally, and then the rest of my life (so far) as an avid hobbyist. In the days when I was using real film, I blithely poured thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals DOWN THE DRAIN when I was done with it. It was just what you did, and nobody thought about it very much. In fact, the packaging for some developers contained a warning to flush the drains thoroughly after disposal, to avoid long-term damage to your pipes.

One of the biggest things that killed film was the rising price of processing. And A LOT of that rising figure came from the cost of chemical disposal once legislation was passed about it. It drove film processing out of most small labs and into the hands of big national firms who could afford to have the proper disposal methods and equipment.

So how will we get rid of equipment and waste, such as batteries, when it’s no longer worth very much when we are done with it, and we can’t pass the cost along to somebody else? I know the owners of a lot of rental companies personally, of course, and I know that the battery issue is still there, even though there are good ways of dealing with it. Our battery manufacturers all have disposal programs, but not all of us take advantage of them, and not all the time. The idea of carefully separating all dead batteries from other refuse, instead of leaving them scattered around the ballroom floor for the clean-up crew to deal with, is one we avoid. We have a battery bucket in the shop, and any we change there go into it, but that hardly accounts for all of them. And most battery compounds are highly toxic, and should be disposed of properly, that is if we want to have Spotted Owls, or people, in the future.

And that’s only part of it. Now the issue is used electronics, which contain PCBs, arsenic, toxic metals, and mercury. Ralph points out that even Goodwill won’t take lots of it any more. And as the speed of obsolescence increases, the idea of ever selling it for anything, and passing the disposal problem along to others, is fading fast.

I know in my area, at least, even the local landfill (“the dump”) won’t let you dump any electronics that you can’t hide in a trash bag.

So what are you doing with it? Any of you dealing with this yet, in any way that makes sense? This is your chance as an industry to head off the next wave of things our clients are going to insist on. Email me any suggestions. This is a great topic for our new blog, and I’ll post the best ones there.

rAVe Rental [and Staging] contributor Joel R. Rollins, CTS-R, is General Manager of Everett Hall Associates, Inc. and is well known throughout the professional AV industry for his contributions to industry training and his extensive background in AV rental, staging and installation. Joel can be reached at joelrollins@mac.com