|
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.
|
E-mail
this page to a friend
