BAN Seeks States’ Adoption of e-Stewards Certification Program

The Basel Action Network is trying to get states to incorporate the e-Stewards certification program that it recently launched into their e-waste recycling regulations. But questions abound about “how much states will be able to use the e-Stewards program because they don’t have jurisdiction over exports,” said Sarah Westervelt, BAN’s e-waste project coordinator. States have started approaching BAN and are “very interested” in exploring how much of the e-Stewards principles they can incorporate into their regulations, she said. “We are in the early stages of interfacing with states."

BAN started work on its own e-waste recycling standard after it joined other environmental groups in walking out of the EPA-led multi-stakeholder “responsible recycling” standards effort, saying the R2 standards were not adequate to prevent the export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries. The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries and many CE makers have embraced R2. The e-Stewards certification program that BAN launched is based on a recycling standard developed by the group that requires recyclers to “eliminate” exports of hazardous e-waste to developing countries, halt its disposal in municipal landfills or incinerators and stop using prison inmates to manage the waste, BAN said. The standard also calls for “strict protection” of customers’ private data and “occupational health safeguards to ensure that workers in recycling plans are not exposed to toxic dust and fumes,” it said.

As Washington did with its “preferred” recycling standards, BAN sees potential for states using a “non-regulatory approach” to adopting e-Stewards certification, Westervelt said. After laying down mandatory requirements, Washington created a parallel set of recycling standards that the state said it preferred CE makers to follow, hoping there would be “enough pressure” on the manufacturers to use the “higher” standards, she said. Manufacturers complied, Westervelt said. “So that was really a very creative way of the state trying to create a program that goes above and beyond where their arms are tied around this export issue."

There are “assumptions” that the e-Stewards certification is a “whole lot more expensive” than program like R2, but e-Stewards’ cost is “very comparable to some of the other standards,” Westervelt said. Unlike R2, the e-Stewards requires ISO14001 certification but that’s folded into the standard. But many R2 customers want ISO14001 certification as well, she said, and in that case they will have to pay separately for ISO, she said. “So there is a double cost there.” BAN charges a licensing fee for the e-Stewards logo and name and R2 doesn’t, but that’s because R2 does not have an organization to “house” it, she said: “I have heard it publicly stated from people who support R2 that there may be a [licensing] fee in the future once they find an organization to house R2."

Some states have recycling standards written into their e-waste laws and others have “vague” requirements, said Jason Linnell, executive director of the National Center for Electronics Recycling. Some states took a version of R2 standards before it was finalized, he said. Several of the newer e-waste laws have references to recycling standards but they don’t “call out anything specific … just because they want to make sure that they are not giving preference” to any of the certification programs, he said. NCER operates the state-run recycling program in Oregon. Many states will be looking over the next two years at e-Stewards and R2 to decide whether “one or both of these certification programs is allowable as the method to say” that manufacturers are meeting requirements. That’s one issue that NCER is exploring as part of its efforts to harmonize various state law requirements, Linnell said.

CEA has been “monitoring” the e-Steward program, but BAN hasn’t “reached out to us,” said Amy Dempster, manager of environmental policy. “As an industry we are supportive of certain restrictions and standards for [e-waste] export,” she said: “For CEA, we don’t have a stance either way on the e-Stewards program yet.”