SCROUNGE is a nonprofit organization that has been at Pennsylvania State University in York since 1996. SCROUNGE was founded due the growing number of improperly disposed electronics in the area, and later developed a recycling program to be able to dispose of these unusable materials properly from the surrounding community.
SCROUNGE was first developed to recycle old computers to nonprofit groups that needed technology for educational purposes within the nonprofit organizations. In SCROUNGE’s history, SCROUNGE has donated over 10,000 computers to other nonprofit organizations.
After the usable computers were redistributed, there were still donated computers that were irreparable. SCROUNGE developed a recycling program, to recycle these old, unusable computers. This allowed SCROUNGE to break down irreparable computers into its raw components parts and sell the component parts to self fund the group. With the recycling project, SCROUNGE has recycled over twenty tons of raw material, that was salvaged from old computers. With the money made from the recycled parts, SCROUNGE can replace parts of unworkable computers to be able to redistribute more computers to more nonprofit groups.