| |
09 Feb 05 - electronics; disposables; job; Freecycle
** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM **
-- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition
--------
Forum archive: http://www.nwpcarchive.org
---------------------
Excerpted from a 1/21/05 item in the Los Angeles Times by Alex Pham:
WHAT ARE THE HARMFUL SUBSTANCES IN WASTE ELECTRONICS?
Old electronics, such as cellphones, computers and TV sets, represent less
than 4 percent of total solid waste in the U.S., but they make up 70 percent
of all hazardous waste. Here's a list of selected harmful chemicals
contained in common consumer electronics. Some materials, such as polyvinyl
chloride, or PVC, release harmful dioxins when incinerated. The source for
this information is the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
- Computers
Harmful substances: Lead, mercury, cadmium, polybrominated diphenylethers.
Sources: Circuit boards, connectors, cables.
- CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors
Harmful substances: Lead, hexavalent chromium, barium.
Sources: Glass, soldering.
- Flat-panel monitors
Harmful substances: Mercury, lead.
Sources: Light bulbs, switches.
- Digital cameras
Harmful substances: Polyvinyl chloride, lead acid, cadmium, lithium.
Sources: Casings, batteries.
- Cellphones
Harmful substances: Antimony, arsenic, lead, beryllium, cadmium, copper,
zinc.
Sources: Batteries, circuit boards.
- Digital music players
Harmful substances: Arsenic, lead, cadmium.
Sources: Batteries, circuit boards.
-----------------------
Excerpted from a 1/21/05 article in the Los Angeles Times by Alex Pham:
ELECTRONICS DESIGN AIMS TO REDUCE HAZARDOUS WASTES
Before the Panasonic SD Video Camera was born, designers planned for its
death. When the $400 camera wears out and can no longer record video, play
music or take photos, Panasonic engineers want it to do one final thing: be
easy to get rid of.
So it has no lead, no mercury and no brominated flame retardants - all
hazardous substances that make consumer electronics such as personal
computers, digital cameras and televisions dangerous to bury in landfills
and difficult to recycle. The camera's aluminum casing can be smelted and
made into other products. When its lithium ion battery runs out, it can be
dropped off at one of 30,000 retail stores nationwide. "We wanted to
eliminate hazardous materials and make it easy to recycle," said David
Thompson, director of corporate environmental affairs for Matsushita
Electric Industrial Co., which owns Panasonic. "This is a design objective
that's being built into all of our products."
And not just at Panasonic. Computer and electronics makers around the world
increasingly factor a product's destruction into its creation. The trend is
driven in part by environmental regulations but also by shorter product
cycles and a consumer culture that allow obsolete gadgetry to stack up
faster than ever. For example, Americans annually toss out more than 100
million cellphones, according to Collective Good International, a group that
collects and resells used cellphones. Each day, 10,000 TVs and PC monitors
go dark, according to the National Safety Council. And an estimated
three-quarters of all home PCs, working or not, are stuffed in closets,
attics and basements - in large part because getting rid of them can be such
a hassle.
To deal with this problem. Germany requires electronics manufacturers to
take back their products when customers are finished with them. Next year,
the rest of the European Union will have similar rules. And by 2006, the
European countries will ban sales of equipment containing lead, mercury,
cadmium, chromium and brominated flame retardants. At the heart of these
regulations is an economic notion that the best way to deal with pollution
is to build its cost into the product. If companies must pay to dispose of
their own products, they would have an incentive to design their products to
be easier to recycle or more environmentally friendly and, thus, less costly
to clean up.
For their part, manufacturers expect tighter regulations to become the norm
in some of their biggest markets. So they're changing the design process. At
Panasonic, designers conduct a 40-step review process that, among other
things, looks at the ability to recycle materials used in their prototypes
and how quickly products can be taken apart for recycling. Because plastics
are more difficult to recycle, designers are encouraged to use metals.
Designers also try to reduce the number of parts or materials used in a
single product, making it simpler to sort and recycle. A 1984 Panasonic
television, for instance, had 13 types of plastic and 39 plastic parts and
took 140 seconds to take apart. The 2000 model contained just two types of
plastic and eight plastic parts and took 78 seconds to disassemble.
Hewlett-Packard Co., which has taken back 100 million pounds of defunct
products over the years, has made similar changes in its product designs.
Some companies also are trying to make sure what they send to recyclers is
as clean as possible. HP eliminated paint from many products because dyes
can contaminate and weaken the plastic when recycled. But "in some markets,
such as cellphones or music players that come in all kinds of colors,
[paint] is a requirement," said Mark Newton, Dell Inc.'s manager of
worldwide environmental affairs. That's why Dell is researching water-based
paints that can be easily dissolved.
"This movement puts the spotlight on designers," said Bob Adams, a designer
at IDEO, a technology design firm in Palo Alto. "They make decisions that
result in how hundreds of millions of items are manufactured each year. They
decide the shape of the object, how it's produced, where it's produced.
Designers are, in a way, gatekeepers." Traditionally, however, designers
have been trained to think of how a product will be used in its lifetime -
not what happens to it when it dies.
These days, products are dying even faster than they used to. Traditional
cathode-ray tube, or CRT, television sets can be counted on for at least
seven years, with some lasting more than 20 years. But newer plasma TV sets
begin to wear out in just three to four years, said Rob Enderle, a
technology consultant. With DVD players, a precipitous drop in price has
also translated into a decline in quality. Other electronics - PCs, digital
music players or digital cameras - become obsolete before they even stop
working.
Dell is moving away from CRT monitors in favor of slim liquid crystal
displays. The CRTs have two costly disadvantages: They contain lead and they
are heavy. By converting to lighter LCDs that don't contain leaded glass,
Dell lowers the cost of shipping the monitor to a collection facility as
well as the cost of its recycling, Newton said.
--------------------
Excerpted from a column by Paul Andrews in the 2/7/05 Seattle Times:
EBAY HOLDS EVENTS FOR SMALL ELECTRONICS IN THREE CITIES
"Don't Trash It, Cash It!" is an event eBay is holding in Seattle, Boston,
and Austin, where they accept laptops, cellphones, digital cameras, PDAs
(personal digital assistants) and other portable electronics, to put on
their online auction service. It's part altruism, part self-promotion. Under
its "Rethink Initiative" for addressing e-waste, eBay wants to keep old
equipment out of trash cans and landfills. And it wants to show the
uninitiated the wonders of online auctioneering, where even the lowliest
silicon discard can draw cash on the open market.
The Austin, Texas event was held Feb. 5 at the Barton Creek Square mall. The
Seattle event will be held this Saturday, Feb. 12, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at
Northgate Mall. (The date for the Boston event apparently has not yet been
publicly announced.)
Here are the ground rules for the events: Portable stuff only - no monitors,
desktop computers, laser printers and so on. Items must be in working order.
All data should be erased. Staff for eBay will do the processing, put the
stuff up on eBay and send you a check when it sells. They'll also help with
prep, showing you how to erase that disk if you haven't already. For this
they take a 25 percent commission of the sale. There are no other fees -
eBay's listing charge is included in the commission. If it doesn't sell, you
won't get it back. It'll be recycled.
These "Cash It" events will take just about anything that works, said
Patrick Jabal, director of eBay computers and networking - even if the
rechargeable battery is toast or the manufacturer no longer exists. You are
asked to bring along whatever accessories and documentation you might have,
including a power brick and manual.
According to a recent survey co-commissioned by eBay, 56 percent of
households in the U.S. have electronic gear they no longer use.
--------------------
From Tom Watson. King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle, WA, and the
National Waste Prevention Coalition:
Although major corporations such as Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble are
leading the way in introducing disposable products, some smaller companies
are also trying to find a niche selling disposables. One example is Neat
Solutions, Inc., in Huntersville, NC. All of this company's products are
disposable mats or paper covers, most of which are promoted as keeping germs
and bacteria away from babies. Their website is at:
http://www.tabletopper.com Go to "About our
products" on the left and then click on one of the five products. Although
some of the products may have merit for sanitation reasons (I wonder what
people with babies think about these products), the most objectionable one
to me is the "Floor Topper - The first and only DISPOSABLE Floor Mat!"
(http://www.tabletopper.com/NSfloor.htm
).
E-mail: tom (DOT) watson (AT) metrokc (DOT) gov
--------------------
Link to a job posting for a Bottle Bill Coordinator for the Massachusetts
Department of Environmental Protection:
http://ceo.hrd.state.ma.us/ceo.nsf/0/ba55bdfb57f754eb85256f97005881f7?OpenDocument
This position, knows as Bottle Bill Coordinator, or Program
Coordinator III, is within the department's Bureau of Waste Prevention.
This person will be responsible for program coordination of the
Massachusetts Bottle Deposit Law and other regulatory-driven waste
prevention programs. This position is based in Boston. The salary is
$48,391 to $67,888. The deadline for applications is Friday, Feb. 11, 2005.
--------------------
Excerpted from a 2/6/05 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news story:
WASTE MANAGEMENT INC. WILL SPONSOR FREECYCLE
The Freecycle website (http://www.freecycle.org )
has mushroomed from a handful of people two years ago to a massive extended
family of small communities across North America and beyond. Supported
totally by volunteers in each community, here's how it works: If a member
has an old couch, for example, that she doesn't want anymore (but it's too
good to throw out), she simply puts a posting on her local Freecycle
website. Another member who wants it replies to the posting and comes by to
pick up the couch. No money exchanges hands.
Now there are more than 2,000 local groups, with anywhere from one to 13,000
members. It all started in Tucson, Arizona, with Deron Beal. Before he
started Freecycle, Beal worked for a non-profit recycling company. In fact,
he still works there, and manages the Freecycle movement in his spare time.
At an average of one pound per item, Beal says worldwide, the Freecycle
movement manages to keep 40 tons of stuff a day out of the landfills.
"People have always said the Internet is going to become a democratic medium
for people to get in touch and empower each other directly," says Beal.
"That's what we're finally starting to see on the Internet - a lot of
grassroots efforts like this one that are really able to take off. And
people locally at each city are able to take the reins themselves and really
make it happen. We've got nearly a million members now. We've grown 2,300
per cent in the past six months."
There's no doubt Freecycle is growing, and fast. Which means the inevitable
is happening: The corporate world wants a piece of the Freecycle action -
and it's willing to pay for it. Beal's negotiating a sponsorship deal with
Waste Management Inc. (WMI), which Beal says is "one of the largest
recyclers in the world." Beal hopes the deal will bring in enough cash that
he can quit his day job, "and my dream, of course, is to have enough money
so that I can hire somebody to be doing the programming for the new web
page."
So Beal's happy, but what do the members think of a corporate sponsor for
Freecycle? For freecycler Nancy Daniels, in Oshawa, Ontario, it all depends
on the details: "If they leave it the way it is right now, it's going to be
an awesome tool for a lot of people. If they start wanting to make money off
of it, then I think we've got problems."
Beal agrees that Freecycle can only survive if it keeps its grassroots
appeal: "There is absolutely no way I could find enough sponsors to pay for
all the volunteers that are required in every city worldwide. It just would
be a mind-boggling sum. So there's no doubt that this is and will remain a
grassroots movement, or it'll just disintegrate."
Wes Muir is director of communications for Waste Management of Canada, the
Canadian division of WMI. Headquartered in Burlington, Ontario, it's
Canada's largest garbage collection, recycling and disposal company. Muir
says that for about $130,000 a year, the Freecycle website will feature a
link to WMI. "We jumped on to this program because for a lot of our
commercial customers, we help them with waste reduction and how to reduce
their waste in the plant before it gets disposed of," says Muir. "And we do
a lot of that work on the recycling and we thought this is a nice service
offering we can offer our customers."
But could there be another incentive - a little recycling of the company's
image, perhaps? After all, Waste Management of Canada is the same company
that wanted to open a huge landfill in northern Ontario that would have
taken some of Toronto's garbage. Part of the debate surrounding that "Adams
Mine" proposal focused on WMI's environmental record - in particular, fines
for environmental violations at its landfills in the United States.
Wes Muir insists the company's not motivated to polish its image by making a
connection with Freecycle. Muir says WMI is merely "trying to raise
awareness among the public about the waste we generate. And to think beyond
just dropping it off at the curb and walking away and saying, 'Well, my job
is done.'"
Deron Beal insists on focusing on the positive too: "It's a beautiful thing
to have a company step forward - that's into recycling - and say, 'don't
give us your recyclables, reuse it.' That's a pretty inspiring thing for a
company to step forward and do."
- end -
|
