Former E-Waste Combatants Take Parting Shots In Wake of Settlement

Though CEA and the ITI Council made peace with New York City and green groups in settling their lawsuit to stop the now-moot city e-waste program from taking effect (CED June 29 p1), both sides in the dispute couldn’t resist taking parting shots late Monday even as they hailed the settlement agreement.

CEA and ITI agreed to settle and withdraw the lawsuit “because we have achieved our objective,” the groups said in announcing the end of the litigation Monday. Their goal all along, they said, was “to prevent the implementation of an excessively burdensome local recycling program that would have imposed unprecedented economic costs on electronics manufacturers and consumers alike and would have forced City residents to suffer increased truck traffic and noise and air pollution."

A few hours later, Kate Sinding, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which intervened as the city’s co-defendant in the lawsuit, hailed the settlement as “most welcome news.” Among the lawsuit’s “silver linings” was that “it brought the plaintiff manufacturers and the city together to develop workable solutions to the very real practical obstacles to collection in New York City,” Sinding said. Still, she repeated NRDC rhetoric of the past year in blasting the litigation as having been “so broadly framed that it put in jeopardy any law based on the notion that the manufacturers of consumer products should bear the financial responsibility for their disposition at end-of-life."

The Electronics TakeBack Coalition, which did not participate in the settlement talks, fired an even more cantankerous parting shot at the CE and IT companies in welcoming the conclusion to the case. “Here we had many electronics companies who had very clear public statements in support of producer takeback and producer takeback laws, yet they were hiding behind their industry associations that were calling these laws ‘unconstitutional,'” Barbara Kyle, the coalition’s national coordinator said in a statement. “This was a very bad PR position for these companies to be in, and it made them want to settle this case, and made it easier to pass the legislation at the State level.”