New York City E-Waste Plan Could Become Model For Other Urban Areas, NRDC Says

"New York City is unique, but there are other densely populated areas in the country, that have many of the same issues when it comes to recycling,” Sinding said. “As is often the case, what New York does will serve as a model for other places."

By the time CEA and ITI withdrew their lawsuit, NRDC’s conversations with CE makers “had gotten to a very detailed examination as to how collection would work in New York,” Sinding told us. Talks included identifying sites that would be made available for permanent collection of electronics or periodic collection events, she said. “There was a commitment by the parties to continue those discussions with the understanding that was still integral to what implementation of the state law would look like within New York City,” she said.

Sinding said several companies indicated they would be rolling out recycling programs in advance of the April date when compliance becomes mandatory. Panasonic, for one, has been aggressive with recycling programs including 11 planned events in the area over the next two months. “I don’t know whether that can be directly attributed to the talks,” Sinding said, “but it’s certainly evidence of the seriousness with which companies are taking their mandate to start doing collection in the city.”

Initially, the law covers computers, TVs, printers, personal music players and PDAs, Sinding said, and a provision in the law enables the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to add categories of electronics once the programs are up and running. The next wave of products is likely to include gaming consoles, DVD players and similar items, she said.

Manufacturers under the law won’t be required to hold a minimum number of events and they'll have the flexibility to formulate their own collection programs, Sinding said. “The idea is that they should start running their programs, and at the end of the first year, through the reporting requirements, the state will be in a position to evaluate whether they've done the job adequately,” she said. The mandatory standards won’t have penalties attached for the first year, she noted, but there are still hard numbers that companies need to collect to be in compliance. “In theory, the state could say companies need to step it up and that they're not doing enough events,” she said.

Minimum collection amounts for the law were determined as a number of pounds per capita, with a manufacturer’s designated share determined by their share of the market within the state, Sinding said. Minimums are three pounds per capita in year one, four pounds in year two, five pounds in year three, and then a number will be determined for the fourth year based on how much volume is actually coming in, she said. “If companies are collecting more than five pounds per capita, which we've seen in other states from data from the first several years of collection, their amount in the following year would go up based on how much came in the prior year,” she said.

Manufacturers are required to report sales information to the DEC, which will be used to determine market share and a manufacturer’s collection requirement, Sinding said. “There is a provision that allows companies to keep some of information they provide to DEC proprietary,” she said.

New York City’s distinct challenges arise out of “one of the densest living arrangements in the country,” and a low rate of car ownership, Sinding said. Space for recycling events is at a premium and consumers don’t have an easy way to get large, heavy electronics to a recycling event. Because of the “significant obstacles to running a robust operation in the city,” Sinding said, the parties have to identify locations where events can be held that are convenient to consumers and also have the necessary space to bring in trucks and haul equipment out. A solution has to be found for consumers to discard large, heavy electronics, and one of the issues under debate, she said, is whether manufacturers should be able to charge a fee for collection of heavy items. “My guess is we'll see some form of that because to get to performance numbers that manufacturers need to achieve, they're going to have to figure out some way to get those items back,” she said.

Retailers like Best Buy, which double as manufacturers on private-label products they carry, can offer swaps to be in compliance, Sinding said. They can pick up an old TV, for example, while delivering a new one and don’t incur additional cost to send a truck, what Sinding called “a reverse distribution chain.” The other option is to offer to pick up a TV or other large item at a consumer’s home for a minimum fee. Consumers will have the option to take the product to a collection location for free if they don’t want to pay the fee. Such fees haven’t been determined, Sinding said, but “one of our concerns was that any fees be structured so that recycling doesn’t become a profit-making enterprise for companies or a way for them to offset the cost of running the program,” she said, a concern shared by city officials.

During earlier discussions, Sinding said, the thought was that manufacturers would be required to provide the service at their cost “with no markup at all.” In her June 28 blog on the NRDC website, Sinding said, “The concept of producer responsibility holds that if manufacturers must internalize the costs of handling their products at the time of disposal, they will be encouraged to design them so as to be less toxic, more easily reused or recycled.” She said producer responsibility has caught on in more than 20 states in the U.S., along with Europe, Canada and Japan and is being applied to products beyond electronics, including paint, carpets, and pharmaceuticals.

What individual state do with the e-waste once it has been collected can’t be sanctioned by state law, Sinding said. “They're constitutionally prohibited from telling manufacturers how they have to recycle items once they take them back or prohibiting them from exporting e-waste to developing countries,” she said. The law, like those in other states, has established “rigorous reporting requirements so manufacturers need to report to the state who’s taking the stuff, where they're handling it, how they're handling it, what the end markets are, and where the materials are ending up,” she said. The hope, she said, is that such sunshine laws provide strong incentive for companies to manage e-waste appropriately.

States aren’t allowed to make those kinds of prohibitions on manufacturers, but the federal government is, and NRDC has been working to get federal legislation introduced that would prohibit exports of e-waste to developing countries, Sinding said. “We're working very closely with Rep. Gene Green [D-Texas] and Rep. Mike Thompson [D-Calif.] on the bill,” she said, “and the plan is to see it come up this year.”