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03.09

House S&T Committee Considering Legislation to Help Scope Out Serious Problems with Electronic Waste

By Barton Reppert

Expert witnesses, including two IEEE members, testifying before the House Science and Technology Committee have voiced support for draft legislation to assist federal efforts aimed at scoping out and devising strategies for dealing with serious challenges posed by electronic waste.

Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) told a hearing on 11 February that “this bill represents what I hope will be a first step at the federal level in addressing the growing crisis.” He noted that “the bill we are discussing today provides support for academic researchers to start tackling some of the barriers to making electronics greener.”

The legislation, entitled the Electronic Waste Research and Development Act, would authorize the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to award grants for electronic waste reduction research, development and demonstration projects.

Witnesses at the hearing included Jeff Omelchuck, executive director of the Green Electronics Council, based in Portland, Ore.

“Recycling the huge amount of legacy electronics that have already been produced is a critical environmental issue,” Omelchuck said. “A good e-waste system would keep the environmentally sensitive materials in electronics out of our landfills, groundwater and air, and would allow us to recover and re-use many of the valuable materials. In addition, it must prevent the export of American e-waste to countries and places that cannot, or do not, recycle it properly. There are many ways that the development of an effective national electronics system would benefit from further research. We strongly support the proposed Electronic Waste Research and Development Act and the creation of a national e-waste recycling system.”

According to Omelchuck, the Green Electronics Council, formed in 2005, is “a non-profit organization that works cooperatively with stakeholders interested in electronics and the environment, to find ways to reduce the environmental and social impacts of electronics. We’re redesigning society’s relationship with electronics.”

Another expert testifying at the 11 February hearing was Valerie Thomas, Anderson Interface associate professor of natural systems at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology.

“Disposal or recycling of electronics can have significant human health and environmental impacts,” she told the committee. “Electronics can contain lead, brominated flame retardants, cadmium, mercury, arsenic and a wide range of other metals and chemical compounds. The recycling rate is, at best, about 18 pecent, and most electronics collected in the United States for recycling have been sent to other countries for processing.”

Professor Thomas added that “in a 2008 report, the GAO [Government Accountability Office] found that a substantial fraction of these end up in countries where disposal practices are unsafe to workers and dangerous to the environment. Used electronics exported from the United States to some Asian countries are dismantled under unsafe conditions, using methods like open-air incineration and acid baths to extract metals such as copper and gold.”

On the other hand, she noted that “if it is carried out correctly, electronics recycling can prevent pollution, create jobs and save resources.”

In a subsequent telephone interview, Professor Thomas emphasized that government agencies in the United States currently have only rough estimates of the overall problem with electronic waste.

“Although EPA has made estimates about how many [computers and other electronic devices] are recycled and so on, we really don’t have good data at all. There are not much more than educated guesses about how many are recycled. . . . We don’t know how many people have their old computers in the attic, how many people have thrown them out in the trash. There aren’t very good records on how many are recycled. There are some voluntary reporting systems. So it’s quite a lot of estimating.”

Both Omelchuck and Thomas are senior members of the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Electronics and the Environment, whose mission is “to ensure that environmental considerations are integrated and imbedded into electronics products and processes from design and manufacturing to end of life.”

The scope of the electronic waste challenge is pointed out in “findings” cited in the draft legislation. “The volume of obsolete, broken or discarded electronic devices, known as electronic waste, is substantial and will continue to grow,” the bill says. “The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that over 2 billion computers, televisions, cell phones, printers, gaming systems and other devices have been sold since 1980, generating 2 million tons of unwanted electronic devices in 2005 alone, with only 15 to 20 percent being recycled.”

The Science and Technology Committee also heard testimony from Paul T. Anastas, a chemistry professor and director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University.

With regard to the draft electronic waste R&D legislation, Anastas testified that “this bill provides a tremendous opportunity to address the important and growing issue of the impacts of electronics on our environment, our health and our economy.”

Anastas told the hearing that the electronics industry’s initial response to concerns related to electronic waste “has been to embark on a program of incremental improvement — making each generation of products slightly less toxic, slightly more energy efficient, slightly ‘less bad.’ However, in a time characterized by explosive growth in the worldwide use of electronics, a commitment to incremental improvement is not sufficient. Nor will even a reasonably effective end-of-pipe waste management system for the e-waste stream sufficiently address the material throughput or toxicity issues that are already apparent. We cannot solve an exponential increase in problems with a linear decrease in impact.”

The Yale faculty member asserted that “our longer-term research priorities must be targeted toward the drastic reduction of both the volume and the toxicity of this waste stream through concerted efforts at better design. We need to clearly define the challenges we hope to tackle, and then address them in a more creative and innovative manner than has thus far been applied.”

Anastas added: “The good news is that sustainable electronics are possible. We have the tools and design frameworks required for getting on the right path. However, to overcome a challenge, we must first recognize it as a challenge — and define our targets appropriately.”

A report compiled by the Commerce Department’s Office of Technology Policy and released in July 2006 said that stakeholders including manufacturers, retailers, recyclers and environmental organizations agreed that a uniform national system of electronics recycling would be preferable to a patchwork of differing state systems.

However, the study found that stakeholders had not been able to come to a consensus on the financing for such a national system. The result, the report said, was that state governments were experimenting with a variety of financing systems, ranging from an advanced recovery fee paid by the consumer at the time of purchase to producer responsibility in which manufacturers of televisions and computer monitors were responsible to pay for recycling. (Today’s Engineer Online, September 2006, “Stakeholders Endorse Uniform National System of Electronics Recycling”).

According to background information compiled by the House Science and Technology Committee staff, in the absence of federal regulations some states and localities have instituted mandatory e-waste recycling. California implemented a program in 2005, while Maine, Washington and Minnesota implemented e-waste programs in 2007. Other states, like Oregon, are slated to begin their programs this year.

Each state program is slightly different, creating a challenge for electronics companies that now must finance the take-back and recycling of products in all states with e-waste programs (except California, where consumers pay a fee for recycling of products at the time of purchase).

The European Union has been ahead of the United States in dealing with e-waste, adopting the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) in 2000, which banned disposal of e-waste in landfills and required producers to take back their used products. Actual implementation of this directive has varied country by country.

Barton Reppert is a freelance science and technology writer specializing in S&T policy coverage. He previously worked for 18 years as a reporter and editor with The Associated Press in Washington, New York and Moscow.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.