PCs may seem disposable, but they are so full of lead, mercury and cadmium that they’re classified as hazardous waste, and California and Massachusetts prohibit dumping PC monitors—which contain up to eight pounds of lead—in landfills.

Taking responsibility for the mounting piles of electronic waste is a new headache for consumers and corporations, as the high-tech revolution careens into middle age, still churning out state-of-the-art computers that make the old ones obsolete within two to four years. About 41 million PCs became obsolete this year in the United States.

How to prevent environmental harm and health risks associated with the end of life of these products is a knotty problem confronting the electronics industry. The solutions are still far from clear, and the industry has resisted taking responsibility. But efforts are under way.

Most major PC manufacturers, and at least one big retailer, now offer computer “take back” services to help keep machines out of landfills. State and federal lawmakers are proposing legislation to support domestic recycling. And environmental advocates are calling on Washington to ban the export of hazardous e-waste to such places as Guiyu, China, where low-paid workers pull apart computers without safety gear.

Smart solutions - Ideas include eco-labels, pollutant-free design

Other remedies include the following:

Designing products that are free of toxic chemicals. Japanese manufacturers are ahead in this effort, with Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba offering lead-free monitors and motherboards. U.S. makers are lagging, and haven’t coordinated research.

Making products easier and safer to take apart. The makers offlat-screen displays for laptops and cell phones are researching ways to encapsulate the mercury in LCDs so it can be removed without contaminating other recycled parts. Mercury-free LCD screens aren’t on the market yet.

Eco-labeling. These “good-housekeeping seals” give consumers information about environmental standards for products they buy. The system is common in Europe, with such labels as Sweden’s TCO and Germany’s Blue Angel, but it hasn’t caught on in the United States.

Deregulating the e-waste supply chain. The Environmental Protection Agency wants to remove the hazardous-waste designation for cathode-ray tubes to make interstate transport easier. But environmentalists object, saying the plan would send CRTs overseas instead of making domestic recycling cheaper.

All of these ideas have considerable obstacles in their way. Many high-tech companies, for example, dislike government intervention and prefer voluntary remedies. Because responsible recycling makes products more expensive in a brutally competitive market, companies insist that any e-waste regulation apply nationwide, not state by state, to ensure a level playing field.

Japan and the European Union both have adopted e-waste recycling laws that could serve as examples for the United States, but proponents of federal regulation concede that little progress can be expected in the current political environment. And the prevailing free-trade philosophy on Capitol Hill helps explain why the United States may never ban exporting e-waste to the Third World.

Industry model - HP operates center to shred e-waste

In Roseville, a light-industrial oasis in the crop lands near Sacramento, a giant shredder gobbles up and pulverizes electronic scrap. It sorts the mash with electromagnetic traps and meshed conveyer belts, then spits it out into bins of leaded glass, aluminum, steel and plastic. It extracts heavy metals that are sent to a smelter in Canada that extracts pure gold.

The $44 million machine is operated by Hewlett-Packard Co. and a recycling industry partner, part of a program that some environmentalists cite as a model for the industry. This machine and another like it in Nashville offer an alternative to dumping electronic trash in landfills or allowing it to steam to Asia, where a voracious and unregulated recycling industry— oblivious to the toxic chemicals involved—would extract value from the last broken chip.

HP’s recycling operation caters primarily to its big corporate customers and takes care of unsold and defective products that are returned. Only about 20 percent of the scrap comes from consumers and small businesses, but consumer participation is rising. For $13 to $30, depending on the type and quantity of equipment, HP comes to the customer’s doorstep and carts off any brand of old computer. Arrangements are made online.

Other manufacturers offer similar take-back programs, including IBM, which two years ago added its own recycling program. Dell provides consumers an online choice: Trade in that old machine, auction it off or recycle it. The Austin-based PC giant has been the target of protest by environmentalists, however, because it contracts out to a federal prison program to recycle most of the waste.

Apple Computer has been a laggard in its take-back program, critics say. The Cupertino-based company has provided recycling to U.S. business and educational customers, as well as European and Japanese consumers. But it only recently began offering a take-back service to U.S. consumers, and still has not publicized the program widely.

The Bay Area alone has 34 businesses and organizations offering e-waste recycling. It’s not possible to confirm whether material travels overseas from any of these services, but HP, Dell and IBM say they keep the recycled material from being exported. Indeed, HP CEO Carly Fiorina recently pledged in writing that the company “does not export any discarded products or waste materials.”

Yet HP recycles only a tiny portion of the mounting volume of e-waste. Since opening in 1997, the Roseville facility has processed 3 million to 4 million pounds of computers, monitors and printers each month. The total output of all the safe-recycling facilities across the country, including programs like IBM’s, still leaves hundreds of millions of pounds unaccounted for every year.

The Roseville shredder grew out of an HP inquiry into where its obsolete products went, said Renee St. Denis, HP’s product-recycling solutions manager. The most valuable materials were being skimmed off by the domestic recycling industry, “but we found a lot of the leftover guts were being sent to China,” she said. An HP team then went to investigate, and found deplorable conditions.

“The report by the Basel Action Network in January was old news for us,” said St. Denis, referring to “Exporting Harm,” the environmental group’s expose of the primitive recycling practices in southern China. “Being associated with that kind of scene violates our long-held values.”

The Roseville plant is run by HP’s technical partner, San Jose-based Micro Metallics, a division of the Canadian mining company Noranda. HP doesn’t make a profit on the operation, St. Denis said, nor does it intend to.

“We don’t hurt the environment or the people in any place our products are made, used or disposed of. In the long run, it’s not good for the bottom line, and its not good for HP’s image,” she said. “And it’s not good for the world that I live in, too.”

Other alternatives in domestic e-waste recycling can be controversial, such as Dell’s practice of using federal prison labor.

At the U.S. High Security Penitentiary in Atwater, about 100 miles south of Roseville in the San Joaquin Valley, prisoners are cracking open computers in an air-conditioned warehouse for $1 an hour, standard pay for federal inmates volunteering for work. The recycling is done under EPA guidelines, but Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations do not apply to prison labor.

“We think we’re part of the solution because we do things in a cost-efficient way,” said Larry Novicky, manager of the recycling-business group for Federal Prison Industries Inc., a government-run corporation that also makes 150 products, including clothing and furniture. “We’ve got a lot of labor, and they have plenty of time on their hands.”

Novicky has opened recycling centers at six other federal prisons from Texas to Florida, since the prison e-waste operations began in 1994. Atwater was the latest to come on line this summer, and eventually will involve more than 300 inmates. E-waste jobs are coveted by prisoners, he says, because they offer skills to become productive members of society.

Last week the program, also known as Unicor, came under fire from Congress members who said its 22,500 prisoners were taking jobs away from law-abiding Americans.

Customers like Dell and other scrap collectors send their electronic trash to the prison workshops, and specialty brokers buy what comes out, such as recycled steel, glass and plastic. What happens to it downstream is not his business, Novicky said, but he figures some of it makes its way to secondary markets in places like China.

“We do the separation process under safe and clean conditions. It’s not like this with the Chinese laborers you see in the pictures,” he said, referring to the “Exporting Harm” report. “That breaks my heart. It’s not the right way to handle the situation.”

Meanwhile, some established e-scrap recyclers are feeling the pinch of competition from low-cost operations like Unicor and scrap exporters like the Tung Tai Group, a family business in Burlingame that has thrived on sending e-waste to China.

“I am still losing business to the exporters,” said Bob Glavin, who runs United Recycling, a family-owned e-waste company outside Chicago. His overhead costs have risen since he bought a shredding machine similar to HP’s after seeing the conditions in China. Now he has to charge more for his reclaimed materials.

“My customers are telling me they can get a better deal elsewhere,” he said.

Global efforts - Europe and Japan embrace stewardship

The United States stands out among other major global economies as being slow to consider international and national legislative solutions to the e-waste problem. In Japan, a new law requires electronics companies to recycle discarded products, but consumers foot the bill. In October, the European Parliament approved legislation requiring companies to take responsibility andassume the collection and recycling costs in mandated take-back programs.

Many European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom, have ratified the 1992 Basel Convention, which restricts international shipments of hazardous materials, including e-waste. They also adopted an amendment that expressly bans hazardous-material exports from wealthy to poor nations. Japan has ratified the convention but not the amendment.

In the United States, ratification has been bogged down in Congress, where there is support for the convention but not the amendment. “The environmental lobby is demanding that both be ratified at the same time,” said Robert Tonetti, an EPA official. “But there’s resistance to the amendment because it goes against the philosophy of free trade.”

The only stab at raising the e-waste issue in Congress this year was legislation introduced in July by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, that would add $10 to the price of monitors and computers to fund EPA-sponsored community recycling centers. Supporters say the bill’s prospects are not good—especially with a Republican-controlled Congress and White House.

As it did with automobile emissions, California took the lead nationally on e-waste by banning computer monitors and televisions from landfills in 2001. Studies have found that the lead content of the glass shielding on the tubes leaches into groundwater.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Byron Sher, D-San Jose, proposed legislation that would require companies to collect a $10 fee to fund a state CRT recycling program. A compromise bill passed both houses of the Legislature, but Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the measure Oct. 1 under pressure from Silicon Valley lobbyists—most notably HP’s Fiorina, CEO of the world’s largest computer maker. She argued that such legislation would put California companies at a competitive disadvantage with out-of-state rivals, most notably Dell, which she believed would not have to collect the fee.

Sher’s bill was one of 20 e-waste initiatives introduced in U.S. statehouses this year, including a tough measure in Massachusetts, but it was the only one to reach a governor’s desk.

Domestic recycling - Consumers, businesses can share responsibility

Davis said he would work with lawmakers next year to draft new legislation, suggesting its scope could expand beyond computer monitors and televisions and apply to other electronic products. But Sher, a Stanford law professor who is the architect of many of California’s environmental laws, is not so optimistic.

“The electronics industry is not going to go along with any legislative requirement that says they have a legal responsibility to take back these units,” he said. “But I don’t think consumers would balk at paying an extra $10 to help solve a problem like this. And I do think there’s a general ethic now that companies have responsibility for what they do to the environment.”

The smart solution to handling e-waste is to design products that don’t contain toxic chemicals in the first place, and make them easier and safer to take apart during recycling, some electronics companies and their critics agree. But many manufacturers are not convinced that U.S. consumers are willing to pay the higher costs that would result, industry sources say. And the architecture of a PC is designed at many levels by different hands, making the task daunting.

Intel, for example, uses a lead-free solder in its manufacturing process, but the largest amounts of toxic lead are found in other parts of the computer, such as the motherboards and especially CRTs.

“We make the microprocessor, the brain,” said Terry McManus, director of environmental health and safety at Intel. “But how do we deliver a product to the market that minimizes its impact on the environment? We have to work with our customers. We can’t lead them in the dark.”

Indeed, the National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative (NEPSI) -- an organization of companies, government agencies and non-profit groups—was launched in June 2001 to explore ways that the U.S. industry can reduce the use of toxic chemicals and incorporate recycling solutions into the design. But participants, among them Sun, Dell and Microsoft, quickly gave up hope of making progress on the so-called product-stewardship idea embraced in Europe and Japan.

So far, the group only debates whether the costs of recycling should belevied up front or at the end of a product’s life. Most manufacturers are reluctant to talk about the idea that they bear cradle-to-grave responsibility for the personal computers they sell under their brand names.

But it’s in their interests to pay attention to the issue, said Clare Lindsay, an EPA official who helped launch NEPSI.

In the future, the way a personal computer is made and the way it’s destroyed could become just as important to U.S. consumers as the speed, the new applications and the price.

“We’re not in a mode where we’re going to see many regulatory remedies in this country,” Lindsay said. “But if a company generates large quantities of hazardous waste, they have a responsibility to properly dispose of it. And industry is very interested in avoiding bad press.”

RESOURCES MANUFACTURER TAKE-BACK PROGRAMS

Hewlett-Packard https://warp1.external.hp.com/recycle

Dell www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/topics/ segtopicdellexchange.htm

IBM www.ibm.com/ibm/environment/products/prp.shtml

Apple Computer www.recycleapc.com

WHERE AND HOW TO RECYCLE E-WASTE IN THE BAY AREA

RecycleWorks www.recycleworks.org/cgi-bin/bin/user/guide.pl?idguide=8

Santa Clara County www.ehinfo.org/hmcd/default.asp

San Mateo County curbside programs www.recycleworks.org/resident/map.html

San Francisco www.ci.sf.ca.us/sfenvironment/index.htm

PREVENTING COMPUTER WASTE

National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/clean/nepsi

Product Stewardship Institute www.productstewardshipinstitute.net

Materials for the Future Foundation www.materials4future.org/index.html

National Recycling Coalition www.nrc-recycle.org/resources/ electronics

ECO-LABELING TCO Development www.tcodevelopment.com/i/index.html

Blue Angel www.blauer-engel.de/englisch/navigation/bodyblauerengel.htm

LEGISLATIVE SOLUTIONS

State Sen. Byron Sher, D-San Jose http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/senator/sher Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa www.house.gov/mthompson

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plan to reclassify CRTs www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/ recycle/electron/crt.htm

California Integrated Waste Management Board www.ciwmb.ca.gov/electronics

California Department of Toxic Substances Control www.dtsc.ca.gov

National Caucus of Environmental Legislators www.ncel.net/ewastelist.html

Basel Convention www.basel.int

LABOR STANDARDS

San Francisco-based Business for Social Responsibility www.bsr.org

U.S. Business Principles for Human Rights of Workers in China
www.globalexchange.org/economy/ corporations/china/principles.html

Fair Labor Association www.fairlabor.org

United Nations’ Global Compact www.unglobalcompact.org

ACTIVIST ORGANIZATIONS

Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition www.svtc.org/cleancc/recycle/recycletable.html

Basel Action Network www.ban.org

Greenpeace www.greenpeace.org/homepage/

California Resource Recovery Association www.crra.com

INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONS

Electronic Industries Alliance www.eiae.org

California Manufacturers & Technology Association www.cmta.net/index.php

Northern California Recycling Association www.ncrarecycles.org/index.html

GreenBiz.com www.greenbiz.com/toolbox

Federal Prison Industries Inc. www.unicor.gov

E-WASTE RESEARCH

Nautilus Institute, California Global Corporate Accountability Project www.nautilus.org/cap/reports/ DodgingDilemmas.pdf

Carnegie Mellon University Green Design Initiative www.ce.cmu.edu/GreenDesign/comprec/index.html

Inform Inc: www.informinc.org