Green Leaf Report

I sit here at my three-year-old laptop, reading about the outdated computer and electronic equipment filling and polluting our landfills. While corporations have restrictions on their environmental waste, what are the restrictions on the consumers who regularly upgrade electronic equipment? It’s part of a critical question that has always plagued the environmental world: whose responsibility is it to prevent costly consumer environmental waste?  I would argue that the responsibility in this case goes back to the corporation, but an electronic device contains components from so many different manufacturers that the responsibility can be problematic to enforce.

I like the European manner on thinking on this issue, and the related RoHS directive. In the RoHS regulation, if any component within an electronic device (placed on the EU market) contains higher than agreed upon levels of hazardous substances, the manufacturer of that component is responsible for the disposal of the entire product.  It’s a nifty little rule that suddently affects all manufacturers in the world.  Even if a company never intends to sell their product into Europe, if it’s resold by another distributer, that original manufacturer is liable.  Very smart.  It’s a costly risk to the manufacturer of any electronic component, and cannot be ignored.  This regulation isn’t as restrictive as is necessary to stop the potential issues of groundwater contamination from electronic waste in landfills, but it is a solid start.

Ultimately, though, if consumers throw away 2.5M tons of electronic waste per year, and only 10% is recycled, it doesn’t matter if the hazardous substances are within agreed upon levels.  In the aggregate, the hazardous waste will again be a problem.  Recycling electronics to regain and reuse the hazardous and non-hazardous materials is the only solution. So this leads back to the original question: who is responsible for recycling electronic consumer waste?  It has to be the manufacturers: they introduced the products into our lifestyles; it’s unfair to expect the government to clean up the resulting thrown away products.  Forcing the government to clean up so that the manufacturers don’t get stuck with the cost would force taxpayers to subsidize maufacturers’ profit margins.  The end manufacturer will have to take responsibily, and share the costs of recycling with their supply chain.  It will raise the price of products, but we’ll see these increased costs eventually anyway, either in taxes for the cleanup or healthcare costs for the associated illnesses from groundwater contamination.