Consumer Electronics Stake Holders Inch Towards
A Green Future At CES
Recent studies highlight the unnecessary costs of the US current
state-by-state e-waste regulation, and point the way towards a unified national
recycling policy
by Lee H. Goldberg
Between the acres of electronic eye candy on the show floor and seminars on the chips that will power the next generation of e-toys, it was easy to miss the green-tech sessions at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). But while they don't draw the huge crowds that sessions on home multimedia do, the show's panels on electronics recycling and energy conservation have demonstrated a growing interest in the unglamorous but important issues that will affect much of how the industry does business over the next decade. Unfortunately, interest may not equate to progress, since much of the information coming out of the sessions indicates that the United States still suffers from the lack of a harmonized set of eco-regulations that would enable manufacturers to develop efficient, cost-effective compliance plans.
The problems arising from the absence of a national policy and the so-called patchwork of state-level regulations were highlighted in the session Being Green: Federal and State Policy Developments in Electronics Recycling, one of two CES sessions devoted to taking a close look at federal and state policy developments in electronics recycling. In his presentation The Patchwork Study Jason Linnell of the National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) documented the Center's effort to analyze the economic and other effects of the state-by-state patchwork of policies.
While the study only included four states, the cross-section afforded by data collected from California, Maine, Maryland, and Washington State allowed them to get a good rough-order sense of the costs that public and private sector stakeholders in each state were seeing as a result of their recycling efforts. Rather than focus on the costs of the recycling programs themselves, the study concentrated on documenting the dead weight costs, i.e. the extra operational costs, overhead, and capital investments that each state and its retail community currently pay because there is no unified national e-waste policy or program.
Each state's actual costs varied greatly as a function of their unique requirements and percentage of electronic goods in the waste stream they actually recycled, but the study was able to identify several common types of expenses that each program generated. In total, the states experienced a $10 million/year expense associated with policing and excluding out-of-state e-waste from their recycling stream. The study determined that half of the $7.2 million/year ($3.6 million) the states spent in enforcing manufacture and retailer compliance with local e-waste regulations could be saved if there was a single nationwide policy. The many redundant administrative functions (product registration, billing and accounting, public education, etc…) that each state had to support accounted for another $2.5 million/year worth of unnecessary expenses, while it was estimated that another $8.8 million was spent on the development and management of the recycling programs themselves.
Sliced another way, the study broke down the additional annual expenses of maintaining the fractured recycling systems for manufacturers to be $8,159,200, the cost to retailers $3,237,586, and a $4,380,000 burden to the government themselves. Electronics recyclers were the biggest losers to the current patchwork of recycling laws, as they end up losing an estimated $9,270,500 in dead weight costs they would not incur under a national framework.
These quantifiable costs were only half the story since the study was unable to predict the additional costs that additional future regulations would impose. Other unknown costs that were identified, but not tallied, included the higher price-per-ton for sorting and processing e-waste according to each state's unique specifications, and the reduced efficiency of a fragmented market resulting from state restrictions placed on the free flow of collected electronics outside their state boundaries.
While there was some debate amongst the other panelists about the precise
economic impact of state-by-state e-waste recycling laws and the best way
to implement a national framework, there was a general consensus that the
economics were much more favorable with a national recycling policy. Many
of the efforts to unify recycling policies have been hampered by a lack
of will on Washington, both from the White House and from the former Republican-controlled
Congress, which has sidelined any significant initiatives for the past six
years. But Noah Horowitz of the Natural
Resources Defense Fund (NRDC) sounded a hopeful note in the follow-up
session Saving Energy with Electronics, where he noted that
the incoming Congress seemed to be more receptive to supporting responsibly-constructed
environmental legislation. "There are no promises that the incoming
Congress will give us the legislation we need to turn things around,"
said Horowitz, "but at least we'll be able to re-start the dialogue
on achieving a sustainable balance between economic and environmental interests
that was silenced six years ago."