Pittsburgh Zoo to offer discounted admission to guests who bring electronics to recycle

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Do you like seeing interesting animals? Do you maybe need to get rid of some old electronic devices lying around your house? Well, next week the Pittsburgh Zoo may be able to help you do both.

Starting Sunday, April 21, if you bring an old cell phone, tablet, smartwatch or digital camera to the Pittsburgh Zoo to be recycled or e-cycled, you'll get a discount on your zoo admission . What can be up to a $28 ticket for a day at the zoo will only be $15 with your contribution.

Elizabeth Neal, the camps and community program manager at the zoo, says that this is a popular recycling event because it helps raise awareness about gorillas and helps to save their species from extinction.

"This program supports the Gorillas on the Line initiative and that is an AZA Gorilla SAFE conservation program," said Neal. "That aims to not only raise money for gorilla conservation but to raise public awareness for some of the threats gorillas are facing in the wild, which is namely habitat loss, which is mainly due to the mining of materials that are needed to manufacture these electronic devices."

Guests may bring more than one device and receive the $15 admission for each device. But the zoo says to make sure that you have cleared the data from your devices before bringing them in for recycling.

Once a device is donated, they are placed in a secure lock box before being mailed to their recycling partner.

"What happens after we collect those devices is we send them to a company called ECO-CELL," Neal said. "And this is what they do, they process those devices in a safe manner and recycle them all in the name of gorilla conservation."

The discounted admission will be from Sunday, April 21 to Saturday, April 27, but the zoo says that guests can still bring in their small electronic devices throughout the year to help protect the environment.