What To Do With Our E-Waste

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State representative Suzanne Butcher from Keene sits on the house environment and agricultural committee.

Last spring Butcher attended a meeting in New York, with representatives from 10 other northeastern states.

The meeting was hosted by the Council of State Governments and the Northeast Recycling Council.

Its purpose was to get states thinking about a regional approach to recycling e-waste.

Butcher says it involves much more than banning discarded electronics from the dump.

T7 :21 we want to set up a process to do it responsibly so there’s a process for people to turn in old computers, we don’t want them just dumped by the riverside

The Northeast Recycling Council and Council of State Governments are still in the process of drafting model legislation.

But Representative Butcher has already signed on as a sponsor of an e-waste bill in New Hampshire.

It will most likely mimic the regional model when introduced next spring.

And according to New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Service’s Don Maurer, there’s plenty of reason to start thinking about a more comprehensive solution to handling old computer monitors and televisions.

T1 :48 PCs have a number of things in them, lead which is a hazardous waste, its also what’s called a persistive bioaccumlative toxin, once it gets into the water supply or the environment it can accumulate in bodies and you have issues with that, lead is one, there are other things in there…

Like chromium and mercury.

And that’s just in a PC.

Maurer says other items include toxins like brominated fire retardants and polyvinyl chloride, and in really old electronics, PCBs.

2:48 so it depends on the electronics, what’s in there, but some of these things are not good, we don’t want to get them in the environment

Right now, it’s estimated that only about 1 percent of what’s thrown away in New Hampshire is e-waste.

But that number is expected to rise to 3 percent over the next few years.

And in ten years, the amount of bulky e-waste being dumped in our landfills could make up 8 percent of the total weight of trash.

Currently, people have a few options if they want to recycle their computer monitors or televisions.

Some communities accept certain electronics at their transfer stations for a fee.

Others set aside special days during the year when people can bring their e-waste to be recycled, also for a fee…usually around five to fifteen dollars.

A small sampling of shoppers outside Best Buy in Concord on a recent afternoon found some people do take advantage of recycling …but not everyone.

Montage:…oc: what are we supposed to do with them?

A standard statewide e-waste recycling program could help answer that question.

But setting it up isn't easy.

It would involve devising a way to divert electronics from the normal waste stream.

And that means finding a way to collect the items and ship them off for recycling.

DES’s Don Maurer says, while a program is necessary, the new infrastructure will come at a cost.

T4 :05 ultimately the consumer would pay for it, if its charged when its sold, so there’s a pre-pay for disposal at the point of sales, whether its 5 dollars, 10 dollars, that will be tacked onto price, if you pay when you get rid of it, its still going to be a 5 or 10 dollar fee, ultimately nobody’s going to do it for free, and that’s the problem

Another problem is exactly when and how the consumer should be charged.

Basically there’s two ways to finance e-waste recycling right now.

There’s the recently adopted approach in Maine, and there’s the model in California.

And the two are pitting retailers against manufacturers.

The Maine system is designed to work like this:

Discarded TVs and computer monitors would be collected by towns and sorted by brand.

Each manufacturer would then pay for the cost of sorting and recycling based on their share of what is thrown away.

The costs of the program would likely be passed on to consumers.

In California, however, consumers pay a so-called “end of life” fee when they buy products from the retailer.

That money then goes to the state to administer the costs of sorting and recycling.

12:55 the retailers across the board all really believe the consumer should not pay a new tax

That’s Marc Pearl, executive director of the Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition. They represent stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, Target and Wal-mart.

Not surprisingly, retailers favor Maine’s so-called “producer responsibility” model over California’s so called “advanced recovery fee”.

Pearl says charging consumers a recycling fee when they make a purchase at the store lets the manufacturers off the hook.

14:18 there needs to be an incentive to the manufacturers to design the products in the most environmentally friendly way and to allow foreign manufacturers not to simply dump product, I don’t mean the word dump, but in essence sell product in the united states and thereby say I don’t have any responsibility for that product because once I get it into California the consumer will pay the advanced recovery fee so if its not environmentally sound, I don’t care

Some manufacturers agree with the retailers position.

HP is one company that supports the Maine model. and it's developed its own program to take back old products.

But other manufacturers feel that the so called producer responsibility model is flawed.

Dave Thompson is with Panasonic and the group Electronic Manufacturers Coalition for Responsible Recycling.

The coalition represents companies like Cannon, IBM, and Samsung.

He says the Maine system unfairly burdens older companies that are more likely to face recycling costs of older products now.

New companies, they argue, won’t have to deal with the added cost for a few more years.

Thompson adds that collecting a fee upon purchase is simply less cumbersome than trying to sort it out at the end.

4:03 when you look at this problem, any state trying to implement a program is going to be faced with a fair number of brands, 280 brands of tvs, 400 brands of computer monitors, the idea that a state government is going to track people down all over the world and require them to collect these products, I think is quite an enforcement challenge

And then there are the people who will actually be responsible for handling the waste.

Steve Changaris is with the National Solid Wastes Management Association.

They represent private waste management companies.

Changaris says some of his members wonder why e-waste should be diverted from landfills already designed to handle environmentally dangerous products.

But he says for the most part, the industry is supportive…as long as they don’t foot the bill.

2:34 the responsibility has to go upstream either with the manufacturer and generator or the consumer, the policy discussion about whether these wastes should be alternatively managed, is one that is seriously on going, there’s a lot of good people trying to figure out what to do with these materials and if they make that policy decision that they want to alternatively manage the material, then the hauler and the solid waste facility operator should be held harmless

While bills have been introduced in Congress at the federal level, up until now, the only e-waste laws on the books are in three states.

The number could soon grow.

Just last legislative session, over 20 states introduced e-waste bills.

But lawmakers and industry leaders alike fear the state by state approach will become too complicated to manage.

They are hoping that if enough states start to really move forward, it will convince lawmakers in DC that a national policy is in order.

For NHPR news, I’m RK.

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