State E-Waste Harmonization Efforts Have ‘Awful Long Way to Go,’ CEA Says

With states continuing to develop disparate e-waste programs, it’s going to be very difficult for industry to “work our way out of this complicated patchwork,” said Walter Alcorn, who took over the top environmental affairs job at CEA in May. States are building e-waste programs with “their own registration fees and their own registration systems,” he said, and “the way things are rolling out they are making it difficult for manufacturers to implement collection and recycling systems across state lines.”

As for the possibility of federal action on e-waste in the near future, Alcorn said in an interview that “there are a lot of things that would need to come together before there would be federal action on e-waste.” He said he doesn’t think it would be easy for the federal government to preempt state laws because of the way those laws have been “conceived so far.” There hasn’t been an “honest conversation about the role between any federal program and state programs,” he said. Alcorn declined to address the issue of whether the e-waste export issue should be addressed ahead of a comprehensive federal e-waste policy, citing his newness to the job.

While discussions are continuing to devise a common industry approach to e-waste policy, Alcorn said, the increasing number of voluntary e-waste programs that CE makers are offering are contributing to that goal. Many voluntary programs are “really developing their own momentum,” and if that “trend continues the dynamic for a more unified industry approach on some of the stickier policy issues becomes more realistic,” he said. CE makers and retailers are of “one mind” on most e-waste policy issues, he said, but there still are differences relating to financing that “we continue to talk about and discuss internally,” he said.

Efforts by industry and state agencies to harmonize aspects of state e-waste laws through the National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) have “an awful long way to go,” he said. Alcorn was the lead author of an NCER state e-waste “patchwork study” and was involved in the center’s Electronics Recycling Coordination Clearinghouse, which is managing the harmonization efforts. Even on just the harmonization of registration procedures, it was evident to him that it’s “going to be difficult to achieve real results on harmonization anytime soon,” he said. Because state programs are all developing their own systems it’s going to be “very difficult to see any real efficiencies in harmonization for some time."

A lot of areas where harmonization needs to happen are “completely separate from the issue of collecting and recycling electronics,” Alcorn said. Most of them have to do with administrative and back office type functions that “makes compliance more expensive and make systems more expensive unnecessarily,” he said. “There’s a growing recognition that there is some efficiency that could be obtained from pursuing these harmonization issues.”