LAPLACE – The tenth annual Household Hazardous Materials Collection Day was held in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes on May 31, and 33 tons of potentially harmful materials were collected and prepared for recycling, recovery, treatment or disposal.  

Eighteen area manufacturers sponsored the community service event which included 103 volunteers.  In total, 65,995 pounds were collected from 384 cars. The amount collected this year was about 3,000 pounds more than last year’s collection. Of all the material received, 75 percent was recycled or recovered. The largest recycling category was 13,000 pounds of used electronics (the most electronics collected at this annual event). In contrast, tire collection was 3,800 pounds (the smallest amount of tires collected at this event).  Also, 2,130 pounds of paint was collected to be recycled via The Green Project in New Orleans.   

 The goal of this event is to provide households an opportunity to properly dispose or recycle materials that are inappropriate for curbside pickup. With approval from Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, this event was sponsored by the following companies as a community service:  Air Liquide, Air Products, Bayou Steel, Chemtura, Dow Chemical Company, DuPont,  DuPont Performance Elastomers, Entergy, Enterprise Products, Evonik Industries (formerly Degussa), Hexion Specialty Chemicals, Marathon Petroleum Company LLC, Monsanto, Motiva, Nalco, OxyChem, Shell and Valero.