While spending a year and a half in a New Jersey prison on drug charges, Walter Fortson enrolled in a class offered by a local community college, knowing that the credits would change the way the world saw him. But he didn’t expect them to affect the way he thought about himself and his future.
“In prison, I realized that there is an incredible value to learning,” Fortson says.
Fortson, a 30-year-old from Philadelphia, dropped out of college prior to his incarceration, but his epiphany resulted in a reversal of his approach to education. While living in a halfway house awaiting parole in 2009, he enrolled at New Jersey’s Rutgers University and graduated with high honors. Later, he received the prestigious Truman Scholarship to study criminology at the University of Cambridge in England.
Fortson believes that educational opportunities for prisoners are key to giving them a chance in a justice system that “does a good job of dehumanizing people,” and so when he returned from overseas, he got busy — expanding upon work that he started as an undergrad, that brought Rutgers students into New Jersey prisons to tutor inmates.
It was tutoring, if not fate, that introduced Fortson to Jim Farrin, 78, a longtime businessman who had recently returned to Princeton, where he was a member of the university’s class of 1958. There, Farrin founded the Petey Greene program, which has students tutor prison inmates (some of whom are working toward their high-school equivalency degrees) three hours each week. Fortson started a chapter at Rutgers, and now serves as a regional field manager for the initiative, working to help bring more inmates closer to the educational transformation that he experienced.
He believes that tutoring the incarcerated has the power to change the attitudes of college students who provide lessons — and that putting a name and a face to the anonymous prisoners housed in our nation’s jails is something that’s essential in order to reform the criminal justice system. “You understand that everyone who goes to prison isn’t some serial rapist murderer that’s trying to kill you or break into your house,” Fortson explains.
Farrin and Fortson are correct about the transformative impact of the program: A 2013 New Jersey Department of Corrections study found that program participants have higher passing rates on high-school equivalency exams, while also demonstrating statistically significant improvements in reading and math.
More than 400 students have volunteered with the organization. Currently, 16 colleges and universities on the East Coast have Petey Greene programs and Princeton’s remains the largest, with around 100 volunteers. But Farrin and Fortson aren’t done; these pioneers aim to have Petey Greene programs in 100 schools by 2017.
The ongoing expansion has been made possible by an army of committed students who, much like Fortson, were changed in unexpected ways by prison tutoring. Those students, Grace Li, Shaina Watrous, and Joe Barrett, all classmates at Princeton who graduated in 2014, got involved with Petey Greene early in their time on campus, and they say the tutoring defined much of their college experience. “Prison reform became the thing that I cared about most,” Li says.
The recent alumni all work full-time as regional field managers (like Fortson) and serve alongside another former Princeton tutor, Sandra Knuth, to facilitate the initiative’s growth. Already, they’re seeing progress — Petey Greene is now active at 11 schools outside of New Jersey. But with each new chapter comes additional challenges.
Dealing with large, bureaucratic institutions is difficult to say the least, and catering to their needs has created tutoring programs that vary from the original model developed at Princeton. To make Petey Greene work in 100 schools, partner agreements for universities were recently created that include mandatory workshops on cultural humility, which help tutors understand their privilege and prevent misunderstandings that might damage the relationship between tutor and student. There is also a strict attendance policy: One unexcused absence and a tutor is out of the program.
The expansion is taking the program into some of the country’s most notorious correctional facilities. It is currently working to bring NYU and Columbia University undergrads to the Rikers Island New York City jail complex to tutor 16- and 17-year-olds. Li, who serves the New York region, says that program participants will likely include some teens recently removed from punitive segregation — the official term of what’s commonly referred to as solitary confinement. (In December, the New York City Department of Corrections ended the use of punitive segregation for adolescents.)
Before the official launch of Petey Greene at NYU, Li worked with a group of students who, as part of a class they took, held a theater workshop for incarcerated boys. When the semester was up, they looked to Petey Greene to stay involved, and in their enthusiasm and transformation, Li sees echoes of her own.
That passion led Li and her equally inspired classmates to not only advance Petey Greene, but to fight the injustices they observed in prisons through other channels, too. They founded the rapidly growing advocacy group Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR) at Princeton, which remains closely linked to Petey Greene. Oftentimes, tutors who want to address bigger issues in criminal justice reform join SPEAR, and when student advocates want to get a hands-on experience with the issue, or feel like they are making a more concrete impact, they sign up to tutor with Petey Greene.
Both Petey Greene and SPEAR understand that education is the key to reform — something that Fortson can personally attest to. “[While incarcerated,] I was looking for redemption,” Fortson says, “and I felt like education was the most viable way to transcend the stigma of having a criminal conviction.”
(Homepage photo: Joe Raedle/Newsmakers/Getty Images)
Tag: New York
All It Took Was One Judge and Two Veterans to Provide Another Chance to Countless Soldiers
In 1986, one in every five inmates in state prison was a former member of the military.
Today, many post-9/11 veterans are still running into trouble with the law. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects at least 167,500 veterans (that’s just the number diagnosed by VA doctors) who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan — and it could afflict as many as 620,000. The disorder has given soldiers their toughest mission yet: successfully reintegrating into civilian life. The nightmares and flashbacks, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and other unresolved mental health issues caused by PTSD often translate into drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, domestic violence and lawbreaking.
In a society that’s appears increasingly disconnected from the experience of war, there’s one civic institution that’s taking strides to accommodate veterans’ unique situation. Courtrooms across the country are now adopting veterans treatment courts — at least 180 established locations and many more are in development, according to the nonprofit Justice for Vets. It’s a model that tailors the criminal justice system’s response to the circumstances: Similar to drug and mental health treatment courts, judges are less inclined to mete out punishment to troubled vets, connecting them with help, particularly from the VA and local military members. If a former warrior successfully completes the program (which can include counseling, substance abuse treatment and job training), all the charges against him are dropped; if he fails to finish, the original jail sentence goes into effect.
“Many veterans will say, ‘I’m okay, I don’t need any help,’ but sometimes it takes another veteran to say, ‘You know, things are starting to spiral out of control,’” says Judge Robert Russell, who convened the first court in Buffalo in early 2008. “It could be traumatic brain injury. It could be PTSD. It could be any number of things that are left untreated. They’re not only debilitating, they’re what’s placing the person in the criminal court system and will continue to keep them in the criminal justice system.”
Russell says the “impetus of the court” began with a single case that came before him in 2006. A former Vietnam vet who’d appeared in his drug treatment court didn’t seem to be responding to the program. Group sessions didn’t work; neither did one-on-ones. “He wasn’t really engaged,” Russell recalls. “When he appeared in court, his posture was slumped. When I asked him what was going on with counseling, I didn’t get much of a response, just sort of like, ‘Huh?’” Russell pointed to two men in the room — Hank Pirowski, a former Marine, and Jack O’Connor, an Army vet — and asked them to talk to the downcast man out in the hallway.
Twenty minutes later, the three reentered. The defendant strutted to the front of the room and stretched to his full height, a tall 6’4”. He stood with his legs slightly apart and held his hands clasped behind his back — a military posture known as “parade rest.”
“He looked directly at me and said, ‘Judge, I’m going to try harder,’” Russell says. Afterwards, Russell met with Pirowski and O’Connor to find out what they said to the guy and how they got a response from him.
The two veterans had discussed their service, and after they’d established a common background, they told the man they cared about him and explained how important counseling would be for him to move forward. As simple as it sounds, the man needed to hear it from someone who’d struggled like he had, someone who could reassure him a future existed.
From that day forward, the trio collaborated on setting up a treatment court for veterans. Their goal? To “afford the best opportunities for the men and women who have served,” Russell says, setting aside one day each week to dedicate entirely to members of the military. The time was used to assemble a team of outside services, so referrals could begin immediately. If a vet hadn’t signed up for VA care, for example, a health official could immediately engage him that day, scheduling appointments and enrolling him for benefits right there in court.
An essential aspect of the treatment court is the volunteer veteran mentors, who function as a coach, sponsor and supporter, providing help with bus passes, rent, furniture or just talking through any crisis. “If they need something, Marines talk to Marines more than they do their own lawyer,” O’Connor says. Many are Vietnam vets who want soldiers just returning home from the Middle East to receive a different welcome than they did. “We never tell anyone about stuff we dealt with because no one liked us. People really hated our guts. Now a lot of Vietnam vets are in positions of authority. They’re in their 60s, they’re on boards of corporations, they own their own companies,” O’Connor adds.
As so many restorative justice programs have shown, rehabilitation like veteran courts reduces crime over the long haul by addressing the problems that initially led to criminal behavior. As O’Connor, who now coordinates the volunteer mentors, says, “You treat the illness, you stop the addiction.”
There’s stories like Gary Pettengill, a 23-year-old Buffalo resident arrested in a drug sweep. In 2006, while serving in the Army in Iraq, he injured his back and was forced to take a medical discharge. Nights were intolerable, alternating between sleepless pain and nightmares, so Pettengill began smoking marijuana to cope. Unemployed (in part because of his injury), he began selling weed to make ends meet and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. Pettengill never did any jail time, and he credits the program with saving him from suicide, an option that had once looked inevitable.
Pettengill’s just one of the program’s 150 graduates in Buffalo. Another is the man whose appearance before Russell sparked the court’s conception. The man’s case manager at the local VA hospital said he had never seen the man smile before, but after the court was established, he became one of the cheeriest men at the facility.
O’Connor gives each of these men a special coin at graduation. It harkens back to “challenge coins,” small medallions that are unique to each unit of the military, only these have the scales of justice on one side and the phrase “Leave no veteran behind” on the other. He tells the grads to carry it with them, so if they ever run into trouble, they’ll remember how far they’ve come.
Data coming in from across the country backs up these stories. A three-year pilot in San Diego (home to multiple Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard facilities) found that recidivism dropped for those in the program, most of whom had been booked on DUIs or domestic violence charges. Of the 74 enrolled, only three reoffended — a rate of 4.1 percent, far below the 65 percent figure for state prisons. Even better, among the 27 who graduated the program, not a single person committed another crime. The county estimated the program’s savings at $3.985 million in jail and treatment costs.
“Once you’re seen the success rate, you can’t hide it,” O’Connor says. “Something’s working, and it’s working all over the country.”
That’s not to say there’s not criticisms of the concept. Although most are quick to thank veterans for their service, some wonder if the military is receiving special treatment that should be more widely available. After all, why do former service members receive a get-out-of-jail-free card while others are locked up? Russell says this is partly a matter of logistics. Veterans need specialized care, so scheduling their cases on the same day creates an easy one-stop shop for both client and service provider. The alternative sentencing is not a free pass, either. Former soldiers are expected to make regular court appearances and are subject to randomized drug testing.
Russell says he can’t believe how quickly the courts have taken off. “When we started it, we thought it was the right thing to do for the community in which we were serving,” he says. “But it was something that touched the heart and spirit of many around the country. They’ve embraced the concept. They’re affording veterans some of opportunities inside their justice system to help them get back on track in their own community.”
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Community Colleges Have Abysmal Graduation Rates. Here’s How to Change That
Community college improves students’ lives — for those who make it to graduation, that is.
The sad reality for many, however, is that they’ll drop out along the way. Only one out of every five students will receive their associates degree within three years, one year past the expected time. After five years, graduation rates rise only to a paltry 35 percent.
“With graduation rates that low, community colleges can be dead ends rather than gateways for students,” says Susan Dynarski, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “Graduation rates are low in part because community colleges can’t exclude poorly prepared students. Unlike selective schools, they are required to take anyone who walks in the door, and they have to work harder to get those students to graduation.”
A program at the City University of New York (CUNY) is working directly with low-income students to boost their success. Since 2007, Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, has reached more than 6,400 students, providing them streamlined access to all of CUNY’s resources. They’re hooked up with advisors and tutors, have early access to enroll in popular courses and receive funds for a metro pass, textbooks and any additional costs not covered by financial aid.
The costs of the program are steep — $5,400 a year per student, much higher than the $3,300 tuition — but backers say it’s well worth the expense. A randomized study released this year found ASAP nearly doubled graduation rates.
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Why It’s Important to Hear the Haunting Tales of War
Who better to hear tales of wartime bravery from than soldiers themselves?
That was the thinking of 17-year-old Derek Copeland. The Philadelphia native has always been interested in military history — reading books on World War II and visiting battle sites from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, as well as World War II memorials in Europe.
So when it came time for Copeland to choose a project to earn his Eagle Scout rank, military history was at the forefront of his mind. So he found one that related to it and also honored veterans at the same time.
Copeland organized volunteers to interview 17 veterans from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. Recordings of the conversations will be donated to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
“Many my age and in my generation will not have opportunities to directly speak to these veterans and hear their stories first-hand, so I thought recordings would be a wonderful way preserve and hear them,” Copeland tells the Courier-Post. He said the vets’ stories were “moving” and “amazing.”
Copeland’s collected stories include an interview with 91-year-old John Lauriello, who was among the first Marines to land on Iwo Jima, and 64-year-old Richard Feldman, who volunteered for the military during the Vietnam War, informing families when a loved one had died overseas.
Maureen Harris, the spokeswoman of the Library of Congress, says, “We accept oral histories and receive audio and videotaped recordings from public and private donors, including Eagle Scouts, as well as original materials like letters, diaries and photographs.”
Eventually, the recordings will be archived for researchers to study.
MORE: Inspired by Homeless Veterans in His Own Family, This Boy Scout Helps Give Those in His Community a Fresh Start
In These 8 States, Students Are Going to Be Served Healthier School Lunches
A new pilot program aimed at encouraging states to purchase locally-sourced food will bring more fresh produce to school meals across eight states.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced California, Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin will be able to use some of their USDA Foods allocation toward unprocessed fruits and vegetables from local farms rather than going through the USDA Foods program.
The Pilot Project for Procurement of Unprocessed Fruits and Vegetables, which falls under the Agricultural Act of 2014 (Farm Bill), was created to not only promote farm-to-table meals, but also help schools strengthen relationships with vendors, growers, wholesalers and distributors, according to the USDA.
USDA Foods comprises about 20 percent of foods served in schools, with schools using their allocation from a list of 180 items including fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, rice, low fat cheese, beans, pasta, flour and other whole grain products. Under the new program, schools will be able to substitute those allocations for fresher, local options.
“Providing pilot states with more flexibility in the use of their USDA Foods’ dollars offers states another opportunity to provide schoolchildren with additional fruits and vegetables from within their own communities,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services. “When schools invest food dollars into local communities, all of agriculture benefits, including local farmers, ranchers, fishermen, food processors and manufacturers.”
States were selected on criteria including a commitment to farm-to-school efforts, previous promotion initiatives, the variety and abundance of fruit and vegetable growers in the state on a per capita basis, as well as how diverse the state’s educational agencies are in size and geography.
For states like Connecticut, the program not only promotes the local economy, but also helps children form more nutritional habits of buying fresh, local produce.
“Connecticut’s participation in this federal pilot is great news for our farmers, our economy and our children,” says Governor Dannel P. Malloy. “Our state is home to thousands of farming operations responsible for billions in economic activity. By increasing the amount locally-sourced healthy food options for our students, we help lay a foundation for lifelong successful habits.”
MORE: The District Where Healthy School Lunches Are Actually Succeeding
5 Recent, Big Transit Moves in America That Are Worth Talking About
Over the past year we’ve reported on stories about the global rise of startups like Uber and Lyft to the feasibility of driverless cars in the near future. While cities nationwide continue to innovate new ways of revitalizing transit and technology brings transportation into a new realm of possibility, CityLab’s Eric Jaffe takes a look back at some of the most recent highlights:
Self-driving car takes on the city
Last April, Google’s famed autonomous car progressed from driving on simple highways to the twists and turns of city streets. In late May, the company also unveiled a compact version of its self-driving car with a goal on the horizon of testing it in California. With such progress in one short year, Google is on track to bring those cars to a city near you.
U.S. embraces high-speed rail
Super fast trains made a splash this year after California’s state budget made room to break ground on its longstanding plan for high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, receiving 25 percent of California’s cap-and-trade revenue each year moving forward. Some reports estimate between $3 and $5 million in funding annually. The state also announced a winning bid and set a groundbreaking date next month on Jan. 5, 2015. That’s a big commitment to moving forward. But elsewhere in the country, high-speed rail projects have gained traction including a Dallas to Houston line and the beginning of construction on the Miami to Orlando route.
Say Aloha to driverless transit
The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation is blazing the trail in the U.S. for the first wide-scale urban transit system that is automated. While driverless transit has popped up in cities throughout the world, Honolulu is the first American city to begin soliciting bids for nine stations, including designs for one at its airport. The concept, as experts point out, enables trains to run closer together and provides many safety advantages.
Bicycles go electric
Municipalities have made major advances on enhancing roads to include safe bike paths, and in Cambridge, Mass., a bike company has made strides on creating a new type of bike that could transform the industry. The Cambridge-based mobility company Superpedestrian developed and began taking pre-orders on its Copenhagen Wheel, which turns existing bikes into electric-power bicycles. As CityLab reports, experts estimate the product has the potential to put the U.S. as one of the world’s top e-bike markets within the next two decades.
New York’s “Vision Zero” safety plan
The Big Apple took a page out of Sweden’s playbook earlier this year when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Vision Zero, a plan to bring the city’s traffic-related death and injury statistics down to zero. The city has rolled out several regulations as a part of the plan, including reducing speed limits to 25 miles an hour. San Francisco is also pushing a similar strategy.
MORE: New York City Looks to Stockholm for a Traffic Blueprint
This City’s Police Want to Protect Your Right to Privacy
What did the Seattle Police Department do when an activist requested their entire archive of patrol car videos — all 1.6 million videos? For the hometown of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the answer was easy: Seattle’s cops went to the computer nerds.
Law enforcement agencies are promising body cameras will bring a new era of accountability by capturing cops’ every interaction on film in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and other cities encouraged by Obama’s promise of $263 million in funding. But all that video presents a technical problem: how can a department possibly sort and release so many hours of footage? Stepping up its commitment to transparency and collaboration, Seattle’s police asked 80 local tech wizards from Amazon, Microsoft and Evidence.com to streamline the disclosure process at its first department-sponsored hackathon earlier this month.
“We’re having a conversation about transparency and privacy. How do the two intersect?” Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, a spokesperson, tells the The Seattle Times. “How can the Seattle Police Department share terabytes of information we’re storing?”
Spending the whole day at the Seattle Police Station. It’s okay, Mom. I promise. #SPDHackathon cc @abscondment
— Ben Gilbert (@gilbert) December 19, 2014
Citizens only feel cameras increase accountability if they trust the devices are used properly, if they cannot be switched off at critical moments or if the video won’t be buried by scandal-averse commanders. But police departments cannot simply post raw video of every arrest to YouTube. To protect individuals’ privacy, state law prevents police from releasing details like the faces of juveniles or sexual assault victims as well medical details or mental health history, explains Mary Perry, the police department’s counsel.
But currently, removing a simple cut from a one-minute video “can take specialists upward of half an hour, whereas more complicated edits — like blurring multiple faces or pieces of audio — can take much, much longer,” an S.P.D. statement says. That’s a problem when the police are already burning an average of 7,000 DVDs every month and will have even more as body cams are rolled out for the entire force.
Technologies like image-recognition seem to be the police’s best bet for a quicker, cheaper way to systematically redact sensitive information. “Government agencies don’t jump out to me to be at the forefront of technology research,” says Simon Winder, head of Impressive Machines, a tech company focused on robotics, machine learning and recognition software. But with such huge tasks, cities are primed to adopt cutting-edge solutions. “There are so many ways we can yet use technology,” Seattle’s mayor Ed Murray responds. “We want to be the number one digital city.”
One of the recurring topics the hackers discussed was what to do when an algorithm makes an error in identifying a person or a frame of video, particularly because so many are shot in the dark of night or in the blur of pursuing a suspect. “The problem is you can’t just say ‘oops’ when you violate someone’s right to privacy,” says Brandon Arp, a software developer at Groupon who attended the hackathon. He proposed a “very conservative” system that hides more information from a clip than required by law but allows for a person to request a manual secondary review of individual redactions.
Ideas like this emerged over the five-hour brainstorming session (and free lunch) in the basement of police headquarters, prompting officials to predict they will become a national model. Officer Patrick Michaud says he was “blown away” by the hackathon. “Options came out of it, which is what we look for,” he tells The Seattle Times. “A different way to look for problems always works for us.”
“Bringing the spirit of disclosure within the confines of privacy protection” – Grant Fredericks #SPDHackathon pic.twitter.com/zVYhnek53Y
— Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) December 19, 2014
DON’T MISS: This Is What Community Oriented Policing Looks Like
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The Cross-Country Road Trip with Stops to Volunteer Along the Way
Bland Hoke was planning a road trip from New York to his new home in Wyoming. But rather than stopping along the way to check out tourist spots and famous landmarks, the designer enlisted two friends to help him create urban workshops to innovate solutions to local problems.
With the help of filmmaker William Novak and the anonymous artist behind the Rotten Apple hacking project, Hoke documented what he accomplished along the way in a film called “Drive.”
“We looked for groups who are working on ways to improve urban environments, and decided to try to work with them on really short creative projects,” Hoke tells Fast Company. “We reached out to people in different cities and tried to more or less chart a line that went from New York to Wyoming.”
To mark the beginning of the journey, Hoke and his two friends began in New York City, working with hacktivists at Learn Do Share to transform old bike racks into chairs as well as fire hydrants into chess games on the street.
As they headed west, the three stopped in Detroit where they coordinated a project with Sit On It Detroit, a local grassroots group that outfits bus stops with built-in mini libraries.
“We helped them come up with a new bench,” Hoke says. “They told us they started with nothing, no design background, just high school shop class. We helped push the project a little bit further.”
While in the Midwest, Hoke breezed through Chicago and met up with Cooperation Operation, a nonprofit that turns vacant land into educational and empowerment projects, to help create a community posting board out of scraps that had been thrown away. The group also worked their way through Milwaukee, as well as an impromptu stop in Omaha to help kids on an art project.
“Sometimes you can plan these journeys, and take a bunch of time and try to make it perfect, but sometimes serendipity is the best thing,” he says.
Hoke partially funded the project through a Kickstarter project initially intended for Softwalks, an urban intervention for construction sites. Due to city regulation and permit challenges, Softwalks was unable to launch successfully, which is why Hoke used the funding for “Drive” instead.
“I could have just packed up the car, drove, and got to where I was going,” Hoke explains. “But we had the chance to do a creative project. I think it’s wonderful to travel across the country and find like-minded people who are working on really interesting projects.”
Hopefully “Drive” will inspire more Americans to take on a more creative way of road-tripping.
MORE: 7 Key Drivers to Turn Social Innovation into Success
The 10 Most Inspiring Books of 2014
In a year where our country witnessed a widening gap between rich and poor, a toxic chemical leak, long delays for veterans at hospitals and clinics, botched lethal injections, racially-charged protests, record low voter turnout and stunning Congressional dysfunction, we at NationSwell turned to these ten books for stories of hope. Confronted by complex issues, these authors never flinched. Instead, they brought us creative solutions and unwavering heroics. Read on for our top ten books of 2014 (alphabetized by author):
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Are there any inspiring books we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
These Common Items Can’t Be Tossed in the Trash Anymore
Chances are, many Americans received shiny, new gadgets for the holidays — meaning their old electronics will either collect dust in a closet somewhere or get tossed out.
These unwanted laptops, tablets and printers contribute to the enormous amount of electronic waste, or “e-waste,” that continually piles up in our landfills. According to the EPA, 3.4 million tons of tech gear was trashed in 2012, and unfortunately, only 12.5 percent of e-waste is currently recycled.
Not only this an environmental nightmare, e-waste also negatively affects our health. As DoSomething.com states, “E-waste represents 2 percent of America’s trash in landfills, but it equals 70 percent of overall toxic waste. The extreme amount of lead in electronics alone causes damage in the central and peripheral nervous systems, the blood and the kidneys.”
MORE: One Company’s Quest to Reduce Electronic Waste in Landfills
Without a federal mandate on e-waste, it’s up to individual states to take the lead. One such state is New York.
To combat this growing health and environmental threat, starting on Jan. 1, it will be illegal for New York state residents to toss out electronics on the curb along with their regular trash. This law encompasses just about all the electronic equipment that New Yorkers commonly own, such as computers, DVD players and televisions (see the full list here). Under the new law, residents will have to properly recycle their gizmos or pay a $100 fine per violation. (The state has different regulations for other electronic items such as cell phones and rechargeable batteries.)
“Electronic equipment, which often contains lead, mercury and cadmium, now makes up the largest and fastest growing component of the hazardous materials entering the waste stream,” Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia tells NY1.
New York already has the most comprehensive e-waste recycling law in the nation (it offers free collection and recycling for a whole slew of products), so this new law is just taking it a step further.
To help residents learn about the new e-waste law, the city of New York created a 30-second ad to play in taxi cabs and local channels.
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It’s still legal to dump old electronics in a number of states, but the good news is that half of the states (see which ones on this map) have passed some kind of legislation for recycling on the disposal and recycling of electronics, and more states are considering similar laws.
DON’T MISS: Recycle Your Phone, Save the Gorillas