Industry vs. legislation

Washington State is toying with the idea of shifting some of the burden of recycling electronic waste onto the manufacturer. The proposed legislation would require manufacturers and retailers to make it easier for you and me to avoid letting our unwanted electronics end up in landfills.

The idea behind shifting the burden of waste from the consumer to the manufacturers is that the manufacturer of the good has to figure out what to do with it after you don’t want or need it anymore.

As it stands now the consumer is stuck with the burden. In NY for example, people just put stuff they don’t want on the street. If it’s not picked up by someone who walks by and happens to have a use for, say, a broken monitor, the garbage truck will pick it up in a few days. Others who want to be more “responsible” about tossing out their old tv or computer could take it to a collection facility. But that requires cash, because it’ll cost you $5 to $10 once you actually lug your stuff all the way to the collection site. Then there are others that think they’re doing the right thing by “donating” their e-waste to charities like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, but by doing that they’re merely shifting the consumer responsibility onto the charity organization. So, right now it’s really a no-win situation for the consumer.

However, if computer manufacturers had to figure out what to do with that monitor once you didn’t need it any more, a lot less computers might end up in landfills - or in China. (The U.S. generates most of the world's e-waste, and we send about half of it to China because we don't want it in our backyard. This link has some photos and info about that.) http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/photos.htm

Personally, I don’t think the WA legislation goes far enough. We need to shift the burden entirely on the manufacturer. Maybe if the manufacturer had all this e-waste piling up that they didn’t know what to do with but had to deal with, they’d be forced to design a product that didn’t need to be thrown away but could be disassembled and its parts reused. Or it could be designed to be thrown away because maybe the materials would be biodegradable. (This plan is laid out by William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s in the book Cradle to Cradle.)

But guess what, the industry doesn’t like legislation – at all – no matter how lenient it is. Big surprise.

Here’s the reported industry response from the Seattle P-I article: “They say the new rule would unfairly burden their industry, potentially forcing price increases on their products or the export of jobs overseas.” Does this sound familiar? They must have copied and pasted it from an emergency kit that comes standard with every industry business license entitled “What To Do If Pesky Legislation Tries To Regulate Your Industry.” Although I haven’t actually obtained a copy of it, it probably reads a little like this:
1) Be outraged. There is absolutely nothing wrong with your current business practices.
2) Immediately call everyone else in your industry and send out a joint press release with this line, “the new rule will unfairly burden our industry, potentially forcing price increases on our products or the export of jobs overseas.” (Note: if all of your jobs are already overseas ie. outside of America, just leave the overseas part in for dramatic effect.)
3) Lobby against legislation. This could include, but is not limited to large contributions to politicians.
4) If things get out of hand and the public should happen to support said legislation, hire a PR company to run advertisements to make the public feel sorry for your industry and make them hate whoever it is that proposed this damn legislation in the first place. That sorry bastard will regret the day they introduced it.

What if instead of spending millions of dollars lobbying against proposed legislation to regulate industry, companies spent those millions of dollars to change their ways? Heck, why even wait for legislation at all? What if industry initiated change? Then there would be no need for the emergency kit. There would be no bickering or lobbying over big business and our politicians could get on to other items on the agenda. That wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Scientific American special issue

I just picked up a copy of the latest special issue of Scientific American. The title: Energy's Future, Beyond Carbon.

I've only just started flipping through it on the subway this morning, but one of the first things that caught my eye was an essay by Jeffrey Sachs about global population control.

The concern over population today has a different tone to it than the debate in the early 1970's. While the concerns about demand on natural resources and strain on food supply still remain, there is an added realization that an increase in the number of people will increase standards of living, thus increasing overall (bad) consumption habits. Sachs sums up the problem well in his essay. "True, rapid population growth is not the main driver today of environmental threats. Pride of place goes to the high and rising rates of resource use per person, rather than to the rise in the sheer number of people. Even if the world's population were to stabilize at today's level of 6.5 billion people, the pressures of rising per capita resource use would continue to mount, as today's poor and middle-income societies increase their resource use to live like the rich countries, while today's rich countries continue their seemingly insatiable quest for still greater consumption levels."

"The continued rapid population growth in many poor countries will markedly exacerbate the environmental stresses. Under current demographic trends, the U.N. forecasts a rise in the world's population to around 9 billion as of 2050, another 2.5 billion people. They will arrive in the poor regions, but aspire to income and consumption levels of the rest of the world. Those 2.5 billion people eventually living at the income standards of today's rich would have an income level more than today's entire world GNP. If the economic aspirations of the newly added population are fulfilled, the environmental pressures would be mind-boggling. If those aspirations are not fulfilled, the political pressures will be similarly mind-boggling. All the better, therefore, to slow population growth while there is still the chance."

Sachs provides a four part strategy in how the U.S. can play a part in assisting lower income countries to reduce fertility rates: "First, promote child survival. When parents have the expectation that their children will survive, they choose to have fewer children, with a net effect of slower population growth. Second, promote girls' education and gender equality. Girls in school marry later, and empowered young women enter the labor force and choose to have fewer children. Third, promote the availability of contraception and family planning, especially for the poor who cannot afford such services on their own. Fourth, raise productivity on the farm. Income-earning mothers use their scarce time in productive employment rather than childrearing."

Sach's proposed strategy is working in different parts of the world, and is part of the global effort of eradicating poverty (which in turn creates an increased level of consumption). However, it will also be important for people to learn about resource management; how to build affordable housing with local materials in ways that fit with local cultures and social networks; for city and country governments to properly maintain physical infrastructures (water, energy etc.) and practice effective waste managment, even provide incentives and policy for good (green) business development and agricultural practices. The list can go on, but Sach's strategy is a good entry point and can be implemented now as one way at lessening the burden we're putting on the planet.

Extended Producer Responsibility

Maybe because it's the holiday season but I've had several conversations with people lately revolving arund the purchase of new items: computers, printers, cell phones, blackberries, televisions, DVD players, I-pods, furniture, automobiles, clothing. The reason behind these puchases is often because their previous goods are either too old (there's a newer, cooler one on the market), or have broken (and no one fixes things anymore).

As consumers we are stuck in a quandary - technology outdates itself immediately, so even if a product still works, there's a newer, faster, better thing that was just released. Or companies make things with a short usable lifespan, forcing you to purchase new items repeatedly. So in our current affluent western society, the choice to buy isn't really a choice at all, it is a given. In our disposable, consumer oriented culture the assumption is you will buy and you will throw away.

I've blogged about this consumer burden before, and how I believe that the responsibility for a product's afterlife should shift to the producer. Companies should design with the product life-cycle in mind (Cradle to Cradle of course), however until that practice happens on a mentionable scale, more companies should institute additional take back programs.

Steve Attinger has a column on GreenBiz.com that talks about Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). He highlights a few manufacturers that do take back their older/broken products (and competitor's products) once the consumer is ready to purchase a new one. He also makes the business case for EPR, one result is building customer loyalty, another is streamlining the production process, which often saves the company money. EPR just seems to make business sense, and until everyone is doing it will give added value to the consumer and a leg up on the competition.

Oil - a valuable commodity?

Oil seems to be increasing in value as a precious commodity, so why doesn't anyone care when there is an oil spill?

Just last week 47,000 barrels of oil spilled at a Citgo refinery in Lake Charles, LA which, according to the latest NY Times article, "forced the closure of the channel, a key lane for transporting petroleum in and out of the region's four refineries. Citgo said the oil poured over the top of the tanks' walls during heavy rain, initially causing closure of the channel's 40-mile span to the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard and the state Department of Environmental Quality are investigating the spill."

The biggest inconvenience was that ships weren't able to pass, and local seafood businesses were affected, as the title of yesterday's article mentions, "Ships Stranded and Seafood Threatened After Spill."

If a barrel of oil contains about 40 or so gallons, that's a lot of fill-ups that just went wasted. We don't seem to care about the ecological effects of a oil spill - even if it is a measly 47,000 barrels - so shouldn't we at least care that a highly valued commodity has just gone to waste? What about caring where the burden of clean-up costs really fall? Have we, as consumers/taxpayers, gotten so used to footing the bill that we accept it as a part of the cost of living?

Garbage day means more e-waste

It's garbage day on my street today and that usually means unwanted electronics and other miscellaneous items are also thrown out with the trash.

Stopping just short of criticising my neighbors for leaving their e-waste for the landfills, I wondered what I would do with my TV once it failed to work or I needed to get rid of it for whatever reason.

If my unwanted TV was working I could put an ad on craigslist to see if there were any takers - after all that's how I found my small, tv/vcr combo last year. I went all the way up to Columbia to retrieve it, and lugged it back to Brooklyn via subway (luckily no train transfers.)

But what if my unwanted TV wasn't working? The easy thing to do would be to put it on the street. I don't have a car in NY, so it would be difficult taking it to a collection facility (which are in outlying areas of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.) I could take a cab or find someone with a car - but again, it would be cheaper and easier to put it on the street.

While NYC WasteLe$$ is making great efforts towards recycling in the boroughs, their electronics recycling events are few and far between (the next one in Manhattan is April 23 in Union Square). There isn't an easy answer to reducing the amount of e-waste in landfills - but there is an opportunity to do more. Perhaps with a little legislation that will force some of the burden back to manufacturers, and a little creative thinking on the part of waste management services we might be able to retrieve more e-waste from the sidewalks.

Some of my previous posts on e-waste.
Mobile recycling
Toshiba Canada
E-waste legislation