Managing electronic products creates new problems and opportunities for the solid waste and recycling industry.

Today's new consumer products become tomorrow's recyclables or discards. Usually these new products do not pose major recycling or disposal problems. Sometimes, however, their components or their design raise serious obstacles to recycling and safe disposal. Electronic products, such as television sets, cell phones and computers, fall into the latter category.

Most of these products contain precious metals such as gold, silver and palladium. However, product design makes recovery of these recyclables challenging. To make matters worse, the value of the recovered metals is usually outweighed by the collection and processing costs.

Disposal is complicated by the fact that many of these products fail the Toxicity Characteristics Leaching Procedure (TCLP) for lead. The TCLP is one of the tests the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Washington) uses to determine if a waste is hazardous. As a result, commercially generated e-waste cannot be landfilled in a Subtitle D facility.

As we use more and more electronic products, the media and many legislators have proclaimed e-waste to be our latest solid waste crisis. In 2005, more than 100 e-waste bills were introduced into state legislatures. So far, three states have enacted very different approaches to managing e-waste.

At the national level, Congress held three e-waste hearings last year, two in the House and one in the Senate. Although Congress is a long way from passing legislation, these hearings show that it may seriously consider legislation in the next year or two.

E-waste legislation has direct impacts on the solid waste industry, including its recycling component. And when I refer to the solid waste industry, I am not just talking about the National Solid Wastes Management Association's (Washington) private sector haulers and recyclers. I am also talking about the public sector, which operates its own solid waste and recycling operation or contracts with the private sector for these services. If we are not careful, we will end up creating another unfunded mandate. The stakes are high. We must be vigilant to protect the interests of taxpayers and our customers.

In response to the recent Congressional e-waste hearings and to legislation introduced at the state and national level, NSWMA has updated its e-waste policy. We support a multi-pronged approached to managing e-waste.

Less hazardous components
The first step in a national electronics waste policy should be to decrease the amount of hazardous materials used in manufacturing electronic products. Lead, mercury and other hazardous constituents should be phased out of these products, when possible. However, in many cases those materials add to the safety and efficiency of these products. Safe or economical substitutes may not exist. The electronics industry is in the best position to figure out how to safely reduce the use of these materials.

Easier recycling
The next step is to make electronics products easier to recycle. Anyone who has visited an e-waste recycling facility has seen the difficult and time consuming steps involved in disassembling televisions, computers and cell phones to get their valuable components. The electronics industry is learning how to make their products easier to disassemble and process. Designing e-waste to be easily recycled is an idea that is long overdue.

No unfunded mandates
The biggest hurdle however, is learning form the mistakes of the past. The state recycling laws of the late '80s created an unfunded mandate for local governments. In many cases, customers and taxpayers were willing to pay extra for new recycling services, but the inability to fully solve the unfunded mandate problem still plagues curbside recycling programs. NSWMA strongly believes that any e-waste recycling legislation must include financial support for collection and processing. An advance recycling fee or manufacturer responsibility requirements should be able to solve this problem.

NSWMA does not know which of these two options works most efficiently. California adopted an advanced recycling fee law in which consumers pay a recycling fee when they purchase certain electronic products. The money is then distributed by the state to cover the costs of collecting and processing these products for recycling. This system has the great advantage of ensuring that e-waste recycling does not become an unfunded mandate.

Manufacturer responsibility is a system in which the company that makes a product is responsible for recycling it. Theoretically, this option should also protect local governments from extra costs. However, we have no experience in America with a mandated manufacturer responsibility law. The Maine shared responsibility law, which has aspects of this approach, imposes the cost of collecting the covered products upon the public sector or its contractors. This is not good enough. We would, however, support the use rates-and-dates to ensure accountability if manufacturer responsibility programs are adopted.

Environmental safeguards
NSWMA believes that solid waste management and recycling activities must be operated according to environmental, health and safety standards with reporting and documentation procedures by end-markets. We must stop the scandal of sending e-waste to facilities that have shown no regard for worker health and safety or for the environment.

E-waste recycling can improve quickly if we rely on the experience of the existing solid waste and recycling infrastructure while researching new processing technologies and developing new end markets. Of course, having recycled content requirements for electronics products will help expand markets.

Safe disposal
NSWMA opposes bans on land disposal of electronic products until adequate infrastructure is readily available to ensure that they will be recycled. As I noted above, some electronic products will fail TCLP; however, the EPA's Science Advisory Board has twice noted that TCLP is a flawed procedure. And at one of the House hearings, the EPA testified that, in regard to municipal solid waste landfills that accept cathode-ray tubes for disposal, pH levels and leachate collection systems have kept contaminants form harming the environment.

Yes, we should recycle electronic products. The resource conservation reasons alone are unassailable. But as the NSWMA and the Solid Waste Association of North America (Silver Spring, Maryland) pointed out in a joint statement, electronic products can be safely managed in Subtitle D landfills. Banning e-waste disposal without creating recycling markets is irresponsible. California's ban fueled the rise of environmentally dangerous overseas "recycling" facilities.

We have the time to find out which financial systems work. Let's learn from our mistakes in building recycling in the '90s and make electronics recycling a success now!

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