National, Harmonized E-Waste Program a ‘Long-Term’ Goal, Says CEA Official

CEA approached the Utah Department of Environmental Quality on plans to draw up an e-waste program that could serve as a national model, but “nothing has been done to date,” said a department official. “What we saw from them was a draft but we never saw anything specific as far as what they were going to do,” said Allen Moore, environmental program manager in the Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste. “It never materialized in anything.” But CEA and department officials did provide input for a recent e-waste bill (HB-102) introduced in the state legislature, he said.

"We are engaged in a process there that will allow manufacturers to take the lead on the development of the recycling program in Utah,” said Walter Alcorn, CEA vice president of environmental affairs. “We are actually moving forward with that.” The effort in Utah is part of the voluntary programs that the industry is running “all over the country,” he said. “We've got more than 5,000 collection sites around the country that are accepting used consumer electronics for recycling,” he said, and that “number is growing all the time.” Representatives of state and local governments and environmental groups have rejected the notion that industry-led voluntary programs could substitute state e-waste laws.

Asked whether CEA proposes to push an e-waste recycling model program at the national level, Alcorn said the “patchwork” of state e-waste laws is “inefficient and expensive” and “results in a lot of resources going to things other than recycling.” So CEA is “looking to develop a national harmonized approach and to take the lead on producer responsibility,” he said. That 24 states already have e-waste laws “makes it a challenge,” he said. But getting a national approach is a “long-term goal,” he said.

Meanwhile, environmentalists rejected HB 102 as a bill that neither they nor consumer advocates could endorse. The measure would give the Solid and Hazardous Waste Control board, and not the legislature, “all the power to decide what the program will look like,” said Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition. Other then saying that manufacturers must register with the state and identifying covered products, the bill is not “specific about how much effort the manufacturers will make to actually get their products back for recycling.” The bill would only make device makers responsible for some recycling costs and not collection costs, Kyle said. That’s a “significantly lower bar than other states have adopted,” she said, and “this is completely out of synch with what the rest of the country is doing.”