Voluntary Industry E-Waste Programs Called No Substitute for State Mandates

Voluntary, industry-led e-waste programs are not as effective and are not a substitute for state mandates, representatives of state and local governments and environmentalists said. They were polled by Green Electronics Daily on CEA’s efforts to develop a “national, industry-wide” e-waste program that would involve all stakeholders (CED Jan 10 p7). CEA has not released details of its proposal, but one stakeholder familiar with CEA’s plans said the effort was to experiment with a voluntary program in a state like Utah, which has no e-waste law, and see if it could be applied at a national level. A CEA spokesman declined to confirm or deny those details.

CEA’s proposed voluntary program isn’t “a long-term alternative to legislation,” said Scott Cassel, executive director of the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI), which advises state and local agencies on recycling policy. “However, it could be a ramp up to legislation or it could be a supplement to legislation.” Cassel said he’s meeting with Walter Alcorn, CEA vice president of environmental affairs, in Washington this week to discuss the CEA proposal. He’s interested in seeing what CEA is proposing and “how it may be integrated into the kind of programs that states without legislation might want to implement,” Cassel said.

Voluntary programs are “welcome,” but they “typically do not achieve the performance results that legislative programs achieve and, therefore, are viewed as an interim or a ramp up to a legislative program,” he said. The institute is interested in “speaking with the CEA and collaborating in whatever way it makes sense,” he said, but state and local governments believe that voluntary programs almost always have been less effective than government mandated programs, he said. “It has been our experience in the decades we have been working with companies that they pay more attention when they are required by law to take a certain action rather than them doing it voluntarily,” Cassel said. The PSI represents 45 state and 57 local governments.

CEA’s proposed voluntary program will not be “effective because we have never seen any of the voluntary programs be effective compared to the legislative programs,” said Sego Jackson, principal planner of Snohomish County, Wash. Jackson represented local governments at the EPA-sponsored National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative (NEPSI), where stakeholders failed to reach consensus on a national e-waste program. Jackson said he hasn’t yet been approached by CEA for input on its proposed national program. But he’s sure that CEA would learn “some good lessons” from that effort, he said. “It will be important to analyze the results of the voluntary programs compared to legislative programs because some of the proponents of voluntary only approaches don’t particularly compare apples to apples,” he said.

It would be a “great thing” if industry can do a “serious job of taking back old stuff” in a way that’s “meaningful and is managed responsibly and clearly results in a lot of recycling,” said Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition. “We haven’t seen that.” Even in a state like Texas that has a “weak law, which basically says all you have to have is a takeback program, they didn’t do anything,” she said. If companies had done takeback and recycling “in a serious way instead of fighting it all these years, then probably the states wouldn’t have passed these laws,” she said. Kyle said she has been told by CEA’s Alcorn that CEA is working on an industry-sponsored e-waste program but “there has been no consultation on how to develop the program."

The CEA spokesman declined to comment on issues raised by stakeholders, saying only that the industry recycled 200 million pounds of e-waste in 2009, and “we estimate that figure rose 50 percent to 300 million in 2010.” CE companies have opened 5,000 e-waste collection sites nationwide, he said.