space Press Releases, News Stories

By Kellyn S. Betts, Environmental News

USA, 1 February 2002   -- Last November, a broad-based coalition launched a campaign to lobby for better stewardship of obsolete electronics goods in the United States. One of the campaign’s goals is to put the United States on the same trajectory for dealing with electronics recycling as countries in Europe and Asia, according to its organizers.

Electronics waste “is one of the fastest growing and most toxic waste streams,” says Ted Smith, director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, one of the 16 organizations in the coalition. The U.S. National Safety Council estimates that 315 million computers will have become obsolete by 2004. Smith estimates that those computers contain a total of 4 billion pounds (lbs) of plastic, 1.5 billion lbs of cadmium, 1.2 billion lbs of chromium, 1 billion lbs of lead, and unknown amounts of mercury and brominated flame retardants. Only 11% of those computers were recycled in 1998, according to the latest figures available from the National Safety Council.

Concern over the impacts of how electronics products are handled at the end of their lives has been growing in the United States over the past two years. Initiatives to ban computer monitors from landfills have now been passed by local governments in Massachusetts and California, says Gary Davis, director of the Center for Clean Products & Clean Technologies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, which is not affiliated with the new campaign.

A total of 19 electronics recycling bills were also launched in 12 states this year, adds Jerry Powell, editor of E-Scrap News, an industry publication. And a number of other states have been investigating the issue, says Scott Cassel, director of the Product Stewardship Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell, which is also not affiliated with the new campaign. Smith’s coalition charges that the United States is behind the Netherlands, Taiwan, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, and Japan, where electronics recycling programs that require what has become known as product take-back through “extended producer responsibility (EPR)” are already well established. In fact, “electronics recycling is growing in popularity in developed nations worldwide,” Davis says. This year, the movement gained ground in Australia, Canada, the European Union (EU)—which is pursuing legislation in addition to what some individual EU nations have already passed—Italy, and Korea, as well as the United States, he says. International figures for how many computers are recycled are not available, according to Peter Muscanelli, president of the International Association of Electronics Recyclers, Inc., but he says the number continues to increase.

The new “Computer TakeBack Campaign” urges the United States to follow these existing programs’ leads. The campaign calls for U.S. manufacturers and distributors of electronic equipment to “take financial and/or physical responsibility for their products throughout the entire product life cycle.” It also demands “collection, disassembly, reuse and recycling of discarded computer equipment to the highest degree practicable, and requirements that recycling is done in a sound manner.”

The electronics industry is lobbying hard against the EPR approach, Smith says. The Electronics Industries Alliance (EIA) advocates “shared responsibility” that does not place all of the financial burden for electronics recycling on industry, says Heather Bowman, EIA’s manager of environmental affairs. Smith says the U.S. government’s trade representative has challenged the EU’s take-back initiative because of industry lobbying.

The National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative (NEPSI) that began this year is trying to reconcile the positions of U.S. manufacturers with the stands taken by environmental groups and the needs of state and local governments and agencies, Davis says.

The Product Stewardship Institute is coordinating the participation of more than 20 states and about a dozen local agencies in the NEPSI dialogue, and most parties are concerned about how electronics recycling projects are financed, Cassel says. NEPSI’s goal is to develop “long-term and viable end-of-life solutions” that can be implemented nationwide, Davis says.

At present, electronics scrap in the United States is handled by a hodgepodge of local governments, waste handlers, some companies—notably Best Buy, Frye Electronics, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard—and consumers. There are approximately 400 U.S. electronics “processors”, at least one in every medium to large city, Powell says. The environmental performance of these processors varies drastically, Powell says, noting that a recently discovered abandoned electronics processing site in Oregon contained barrels of the acid used to extract precious metals like gold, silver, platinum, and palladium from computing equipment. Cleaning up the site is expected to cost the state $500,000, he says. “There are probably people who claim to be recycling who actually put [the electronics products] in a container and ship it away,” Cassel adds.

The ultimate disposition of obsolete electronics products is also a concern of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has been developing recommendations and guidelines for countries embracing electronics recycling. When electronics products collected for recycling end up in developing countries like China, they may not be processed in the most environmentally friendly ways, says Davis, who is working with the OECD.

Burning is the easiest way to harvest the precious metals hidden inside electronic equipment, says Dan Millison, an environmental consultant familiar with hazardous waste issues in the Pacific Basin. Millison says “it’s a pretty safe bet” that much of the electronic junk reprocessed in China goes up in smoke, sending toxic dioxins, dibenzofurans, and metals into the atmosphere.

Figures for how much waste actually ends up in places like China are hard to come by, experts agree. But Powell estimates that at least one-third of all U.S. scrapped electronics are exported offshore. Smith points out that government studies have shown that it costs 10 times less to process scrapped electronics materials in China than in the United States because Chinese labor costs are so much lower and environmental regulations are not well enforced.

The Computer TakeBack Campaign addresses such concerns by calling on the federal government to “ban exports of hazardous materials from discarded electronic waste equipment.”