It’s time to throw out your computer, well, your old one.

On Friday, The NetApp Green Team set up an area on Innovation Campus for students, faculty, staff and other innovation partners to shred papers and get rid of electronic waste.

In this quarterly event, items such as personal documents, personal electronics, including appliances and hard drives can be thrown out and recycled. The main goal of this event is to facilitate the recycling of e-waste and shredding of paper. 

E-waste is a growing problem and generates about 50 million metric tons per year — the world is currently at about 40 million tons of e-waste this year. 

The Green Team, which organized the event, is composed of NetApp employees who volunteer in their spare time. 

“Over time, we’ve come up with ideas, the company’s adopted them, taking them over, like facilities took over the recycling of all the materials, so we’ve turned our attention to other things,” Hepner said.

Hepner said NetApp employees have appreciated having the opportunity to bring e-waste items with them to the office and recycle them. The local Wichita community also participated in the event and brought items in to recycle. 

“We work with Netapp, with facilities, just to come up with ideas, you know, things that we can do in a more sustainable way.” Chris Hepner, leader of the Green Team, said.

Hepner said this is a campus-wide initiative and would like to partner with Wichita State’s green group as they’ve done in the past.