Trade Group Forges E-waste Proposal
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Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) agreement outlines recycling requirements for TV sets, computer monitors, desktops, and laptops.
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Major vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Sony are working together to push through a legislative mandate in the U.S. that will make it easier for users to recycle their consumer electronics.The mandate calls for companies to cut&#160;consumer electronics recycling&#160;costs and to make their reuse and recycling the highest priority when manufacturing products, panelists said during a talk at the International Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas.The cost to consumers of recycling products, including things like collection fees, is high, the panelists said, and some manufacturers have taken advantage of weak recycling laws to manufacture products that cannot be effectively recycled or reused.Some companies have standards in place to manufacture products that are easy to recycle, but others hope to drive down their own costs by adopting lower production standards, the panelists said.A legislative mandate would create a level playing field for manufacturers, said Tod Arbogast, director of sustainable business at Dell. A common approach to designing for recycling will promote the production of products that can be recycled and drive down manufacturing costs through effective product design and distribution.As an example of what can be done, Sony&#39;s new OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TV is designed to be disassembled by common household tools, said Douglas Smith, Sony&#39;s director of corporate environmental affairs. It is a step toward making products that can be easily recycled, he said.To be effective, recycling processes will be needed to convert used components back to original raw material for other products, followed by reuse or resale. Production costs can be cut through recycling and reusing materials rather than extracting and processing raw materials, said Dell&#39;s Arbogast.&quot;There are significant economic benefits in doing so as well as significant environmental benefits, which I think are often forgotten,&quot; Arbogast said.HP is adopting standards to recycle printers with plastic that doesn&#39;t convert to raw material, said Renee St. Denis, director of recycling at HP. The end-of-life resale value of printers after seven to 10 years of usage is minimal, but the high cost of plastics versus other printer components has made the company come up with innovative reuses of those plastics, she said.Dell already follows a Texas state law that requires PC manufacturers to dispose of products as easily as they are placed in the market, Arbogast said. The company accepts used Dell PCs for free via mail, Arbogast said.Sony is taking full responsibility for the products its manufactures -- cell phones, TVs and other devices -- by offering the ability to recycle them at no cost, Smith said.In March, Sony will launch a program in the U.S. where consumers can recycle consumer electronics for free by dropping them off at locations within a 20-mile radius of any SonyStyle store. Though the company has only 55 SonyStyle stores in the U.S., the company hopes to expand the effort by involving its distributors and other companies.Sony takes full responsibility for products it manufactures and has already recycled a giant TV screen belonging to the city of Tampa Bay for free, and the company wants to deliver the same recycling ability to users, said Smith.
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Telecoms standards group seeks developers
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Charity says don't junk kit, send it to Africa instead The long-awaited Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directive finally comes into force on Sunday, 1 July.â¦
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No current figures exist for how much e-junk is recycled, but industry experts believe it's a sliver of the total. People don't know where to take their used electronics, and toxic components are a mounting problem.
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(InfoWorld) - Electronics manufacturers will have to collect and recycle outdated PCs -- but not TVs -- from consumers in Texas, according to a bill working its way through the state legislature that could become a model for other states. According to the legislation, called House Bill 2714, manufacturers would have to place a sticker on any computer or monitor they wanted to sell in the state, informing consumers that they may return the equipment to the vendor for recycling or reuse without paying an additional fee. Each manufacturer would then have to file an annual report to state regulators listing the weight of computer equipment they have recycled or reused. PCs and computer peripherals put out in curbside trash end up in landfills, where they can leach lead, mercury, and other toxins into the environment. "Texans generate a massive amount of 'e-waste' every year -- enough to threaten to overwhelm our landfills, let alone poison our air or water. But I believe that if we partner with manufacturers who are increasingly concerned about the issue, we can find a better home for our aging computers and iPods," said the bill's sponsor, Texas state Senator Kirk Watson, in a statement on his Web site. The bill passed votes in the state Senate and House of Representatives in May and awaits a signature from Texas Governor Rick Perry. A spokeswoman for the governor's office confirmed on Friday that Perry had received the bill but said he had not yet announced whether he would sign it by the June 17 deadline. Despite the bill's smooth progress through the Texas statehouse, some recycling experts warn that it is incomplete. The bill has a good fiscal structure as it assigns environmental responsibility to the PC manufacturer instead of the consumer, the state, or the landfill operator, said Ted Smith, senior strategist for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. But the bill is flawed because it focuses only on PCs and their peripherals instead of covering a wider array of electronic equipment. "We prefer the 'producer responsibility' approach rather than the consumer fee approach, so that part we like," Smith said. "However, the Texas bill only applies to computers and not to TVs -- this is a major weakness and is as a result of Dell's lobbying position. TVs are just as toxic and problematic as computers, and we favor a comprehensive approach that covers both." Dell has a major corporate presence in the state as the world's second-largest PC vendor has headquarters in Round Rock, just outside of the state capital of Austin. On Friday, Dell denied opposing the inclusion of television sets in the law, but said that TVs do not fit easily into standard PC recycling streams because they include different components than computers and have a far longer lifecycle. "Our focus was, 'Let's make sure that IT and consumer electronics get in there, and if legislators want to put other electronics in the mix, that would be fine with us.' But what we didn't want to do was to slow or stall the process of the legislation," said Dell spokeswoman Colleen Ryan. In fact, if the law passes in its current form, it would have no impact on Dell's current recycling policies because the company already offers worldwide free recycling of used Dell equipment, she said. "Our take is that the marketplace is best positioned to address recycling and that the legislature shouldn't collect fees or create new government infrastructure for recycling. We think Texas is an opportunity to set an example for the rest of the nation." Dell is now working with policymakers in several other states to create the same type of "market-driven" approach to recycling, including electronics recycling bills now pending in North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Tennessee, she said. Those bills have a different model than existing laws in California, Maine, Maryland, and Washington, which impose taxes on consumers or fees on vendors in order to fund government programs that administer the recycling programs, she said. Despite the criticism of its lobbying efforts, Dell has announced a handful of recycling and power-efficiency iniatives in recent days. On Friday, Dell said that the EPEAT government procurement Web site awarded its highest rating to Dell's Latitude D630 notebook PC as well as the OptiPlex 740 and 745 desktops. Dell also announced a plan on Tuesday to reduce the carbon intensity of its global operations by 15 percent by 2012, helping reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. "We ultimately think this [state bill] is the simplest, most effective way to recycle outdated electronics, and we hope the governor sees it the same way," Ryan said.
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By Georgia Evdoxiadis Daily Herald Staff Writer  Three neighboring governments have teamed up to bring consumer electronics recycling to all their residents.
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Online auction company eBay Inc.  EBAY.O on Thursday unveiled an initiative to join personal  computer makers and their environmental critics in an effort to  recycle more of the up to 400 million electronic products that  are thrown out every year.
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Officials from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the British Office of Fair Trading (OFT) hosted the first international meeting of spam enforcement agencies today in London.
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Nine companies join a scheme to measure and reduce a product's impact on the environment.
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A group representing some of the worldâs leading banks will urge the U.S. to introduce a lightly regulated system for trading carbon emissions permits.
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(InfoWorld) - Measures to reduce the millions of tons of electronic waste generated each year by manufactures of computers, mobile phones and other consumer electronic products will be the focus of a United Nations-sponsored conference in the capital of Kenya. Delegates from about 120 governments gathered in Nairobi on Monday to begin week-long talks on how to reduce the use of toxic substances, such as lead, cadmium and mercury, found in PCs and cell phones, and to promote programs for recycling and re-using as many components as possible. The U.N. estimates that up to 50 million metric tons of "e-waste" are generated worldwide every year, representing more than 5 percent of all municipal solid waste. In the U.S. alone, as many as 20 million PCs are thrown out every year. A good chunk of that waste ends up in Africa and other developing countries, according to the U.N. Every month, more than 100,000 disregarded computers are entering the Nigerian port of Lagos alone, said U.N. Under-Secretary General Achim Steiner in a speech. Local experts estimate that up to 75 percent of the used PCs, TVs and phones sent from developed countries are unusable and end up in the landfills of developing countries, where the items are often burned, releasing toxic fumes and leaching chemicals. On the table at this week's meeting are proposals to encourage manufacturers to take more responsibility for their products, from the design stage through the supply chain to final disposal. In a speech, Sachiko Kuwabara-Yamamoto, executive secretary of the Basel Convention, which monitors hazardous waste, pointed to a partnership with several mobile phone manufacturers and operators, including Nokia Corp, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB and Vodafone Group PLC to develop programs for recycling and re-using the millions of mobile phones now sold worldwide every year.
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NEW YORK -- When Office Depot Inc. stores ran an electronics recycling drive last summer that accepted everything from cellphones to televisions, some stores were overwhelmed by the amount of e-trash they received.
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Because of tight regulations enacted by the European Union in 1994, proper waste disposal  has become prohibitively expensive. Enter the black-market trash brokers, who have taken to "port hopping" - moving toxic rubbish along the line of least resistance to underregulated areas in Africa or Asia.
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Online forum will help consumers learn how to recycle old PCs--and potentially keep government regulators at bay.
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A group of technology companies is offering to share some of its patents to encourage the development of environmentally friendly technologies.IBM, Nokia, Sony, and bulk-mailing equipment manufacturer Pitney-Bowes have together donated patents to the Eco-patent Commons, an organization set up to share the patents for technology with environmental benefits.Any organization willing to donate a patent for environmentally friendly technology to the commons can join the group. The patents are made available for use by members and nonmembers alike.So far, patents pledged to the commons cover fields such as waste water treatment, air purification, cell-phone recycling and reducing printer ink consumption. IBM has pledged 27 patents, Pitney Bowes two, and Nokia and Sony one each.The Eco-patent Commons will be administered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a group which brings together CEOs in industries such as cement, electrical utilities, timber, mining and transport.The group wants businesses to donate patents for technologies that have a positive environmental impact, but that are not related to their core business.It hopes that access to patents in the Commons will enable businesses facing environmental challenges that have already been solved by others to develop cleaner, less energy-intensive products as a result.The move is inspired by the success of the free and open-source software sector, where the sharing information has resulted in the creation of many new products, the group said.Together, the companies apply for thousands of patents each year. IBM in particular regularly tops the league tables for&#160;most filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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(InfoWorld) - All public-sector purchasers of office equipment in Europe will in future be obliged to buy brands that carry theÂ Energy StarÂ logo, the environmental quality standard agreed on by the U.S. and the European Union, following a vote in the European Parliament Tuesday. "This regulation gives us the perfect opportunity to introduce a novelty: for the first time in E.U. history, common energy efficiency specifications for public procurement will apply to all member states and the European institutions," said Nikolaos Vakalis, the member of the European Parliament who led the debate. In addition to making the Energy Star logo obligatory for public procurements of equipment, the new law formalizes an agreement reached last December with the U.S. government to extend theÂ Energy Star planÂ for another five years, with higher energy efficiency requirements than those in place now. The European Commission initiated the Energy Star plan in 2001 but it took a long time to gain acceptance in the market. In 2003 the U.S. joined the plan and a database of companies that met the required standards was created. Since 2003 more firms have been striving to join the Energy Star plan and the energy efficiency requirements for various office tools including PCs, printers, and copiers, have been raised. Today the database includes 17 makers of laptops, 18 desktop manufacturers, 15 printer makers and four scanner manufacturers. The E.U. and U.S. agreement signed in December is expected to yield 30 terawatt-hours in electricity savings -- the approximate equivalent of the annual electricity demand in Hungary -- in the E.U. over the next three years.