Today Only at our Augusta location we are offering Gifford's Famous ice cream 100% free to you and everyone in your party simply for bringing in electronic waste.

Bring in TVs, computers, monitors, cell phones, printers, stereo systems, DVD players, MP3 players, microwaves, cable & wires, laptops, other home electronics, air conditioners, cameras, video games, or other small appliances and we will reward you with Gifford's World Class Ice Cream. No fee disposal and a reward for your efforts. No fine print, no hidden fees, no catch. Doesn't get much easier than that to do the right thing.

This event is available to our customers, both business (under 100 employees), residential, and also non customers and the general public. Remember, today only from 8am until around 1pm at our Augusta, Maine store.

Why are we doing this? .......

Gadgets can be incredibly useful and beneficial parts of our lives. They can connect us, inform us, tell us which way to go and entertain us. And even as they can sometimes lead us to live life virtually instead of being truly in the moment, they can also bring us closer to the world around us.

One of the biggest downsides of electronics is that their components are toxic to the environment, and to us, if they're just thrown away and left to leach into the earth. The ideal situation would be that all of us use, repair and repurpose our electronics until we no longer can and then at that point, we recycle them responsibly. Unfortunately, the statistics show that we don't come close to that ideal.

In 2014, global smartphone sales grew by 23 percent, but according to the EPA, only 27% of our e-waste is recycled annually, meaning our consumption of smartphones and other gadgets keeps growing while we keep tossing our old models in the trash. In 2010, that meant that only 649,000 tons of e-waste out of 2.44 million discarded were recycled.

If we collectively did our part and Americans recycled the 130 million cellphones that are thrown away each year, we would save enough energy to power 24,000 homes. If we recycled one million discarded laptops per year, we'd save the equivalent of powering 3,657 homes.

More than just the energy that could be saved by recycling electronics instead of manufacturing brand new ones, the metals that could be reused instead of having to mine for new supplies could prevent further air and water pollution from the processes used to harvest the metals. For every million cell phones recycled, 35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold and 33 pounds of palladium could be recovered.

Many of the metals used in our gadgets are rare earth metals that are in limited supply.