City E-Waste Event Becomes De Facto Community Gathering; 'Better Than A Block Party,' Says Attendee

WAUKESHA — The city's biannual e-waste disposal event, scheduled to run from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Public Works facility on Frame Street, did not end at noon. It ended at 12:47 p.m., after 340 vehicles had come through, several dozen residents had stopped moving through the line entirely, and at least one attendee had produced a folding chair from his trunk that he had not brought to dispose of.

The event is designed as a drive-through operation: residents pull up, hand off old monitors, VCRs, printers, and the like to staff in the Public Works lot, and pull away. City facilities coordinator James Duvall said the typical dropoff takes "a couple minutes, tops." By 10:15 a.m. Saturday, he said, it was taking considerably longer, for reasons that had nothing to do with the electronics.

340 Vehicles

Michael Steiner, 57, arrived around 10 a.m. to drop off three broken monitors that had been sitting in his garage, by his estimate, since 2019. He said he expected to be there for ten minutes. Instead, he said, he ended up talking for the better part of an hour with his neighbor, Carol Metz, 54, whom he recognized in the line two cars ahead of him.

"We got to talking about what the heck these cables even were," Steiner said, gesturing at a tangle of cords he had also brought, unsure of their origin or purpose. "Turns out neither of us knew. That's a conversation. You don't get that at the curb."

"Better than a block party. Nobody's grilling, nobody's blocking your driveway, and everybody already has somewhere to be after."

— Michael Steiner, 57, e-waste event attendee

Duvall said the city logged 340 individual vehicles over the course of the morning, a figure he called "at least 200 percent" above what a typical spring or fall e-waste event draws. He said the Saturday heat, which reached 98 degrees by late morning, may have played a role, though not in the direction city planners might have expected.

"You'd think the heat would push people through faster," Duvall said. "Instead we had people parked in the shade of the loading dock for 40 minutes, just talking. I think it was out of sheer desperation for conversation. Nobody wanted to go stand in their own yard alone in that."

The Cables

Staff working the sorting tables said the slowdown was compounded by a secondary phenomenon: residents lingering not just with neighbors but with strangers, comparing the contents of what they had brought. A box fan from 2004. A karaoke machine missing its microphone. A crate of what one worker described only as "cords for things nobody could identify, including us."

Duvall said Public Works does not typically staff the event for socializing and had only enough traffic cones to manage a 30-minute vehicle turnover, not a three-hour one. By 11:30 a.m., he said, staff began directing lingering attendees to the gravel overflow lot so the drop-off lane could keep moving.

Councilman Gary Puchalski, who stopped by around 11 a.m. to drop off a fax machine, said he was "not surprised, exactly, but definitely surprised" by the turnout. "People will show up for almost anything if you tell them it's between 9 and noon on a Saturday," Puchalski said. "The electronics part is almost incidental at this point."

Next Time, Maybe October

Duvall said the city is now considering moving the next e-waste event, currently planned for January, to a cooler month instead, though he acknowledged this would not necessarily reduce turnout given Saturday's numbers. "If people want to stand around in a Public Works parking lot talking about VCRs, honestly, more power to them," he said. "We can staff for that. We just need to know it's happening."

Steiner, for his part, said he plans to attend the next event regardless of temperature, and to bring more than three monitors. "I've got at least two more in the basement I didn't get to," he said. "And Carol says she's got a whole box of chargers nobody's used since the Obama administration. We're going to figure those out together."