Although roughly two-thirds of the world’s population lives in areas where there is legislation offering either incentives or mandates to recycle obsolete electronics, large sections of the United States fall into the remaining one-third of the planet with no such law in place. Speaking at the 2015 Electronics Recycling Asia event, held in Singapore in mid-November, one presenter said the current situation in the U.S. can make it difficult for recyclers.
Steve Skurnac, the global president of Sims Recycling Solutions, provided an overview of the numerous end-of-life electronics systems in place in the United States—the world’s largest generator of electronic scrap—where there is no national legislation governing the practice.
In the U.S., 25 of the 50 states have take-back laws of some kind on their books, but the comprehensiveness of these laws varies widely. California has one of the most comprehensive and adequately funded laws, said Skurnac, but it also has proven susceptible to fraud. “There is an economic incentive for unscrupulous players to bring in material from outside the state,” he commented.
California is the only state that charges an advanced recovery fee (ARF) when consumer electronics are purchased. The collected fees help fund collection and recycling in the state. Of the remaining 49 states, 24 of them have some variation of an extended producer responsibility (EPR) law, said Skurnac.
These laws, however, can vary widely, and a multi-state operator like Sims Recycling Solutions must navigate 25 different systems of compliance. Even with many EPR laws in place, “It’s still very easy to landfill this material,” said Skurnac, who pointed that 30 of the 50 states have no landfill ban on obsolete electronics.
Different states, said Skurnac, have “different sets of covered devices, different fiscal calendars and different covered entities [stakeholders].” He continued, “As a collector, you can’t even use the same business model in different states. This is what happens when you don’t have national legislation, but instead have different states with good intentions.”
Although the problem seems clear to see, Skurnac said he does not see the situation changing in the U.S. any time soon. “There is no political will in any way, shape or form in the near future, in my opinion” for national legislation to pass in the U.S., he commented. “It’s a difficult situation right now. The U.S. could learn a lot from the European experience, but it’s unlikely to happen.”
In China, the nation that generates the second largest amount of e-scrap by volume, the government there is grappling with how to best recover resources from many discarded materials streams, according to Professor Duan Weng of Tsinghua University in Beijing. Those streams include municipal solid waste, construction and demolition materials and waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE).
Recovering resources from these streams is part of a “national law to make the circular economy a national strategy,” said Duan. Even so, “implementation remains difficult,” he added.
The proper handling of WEEE materials also falls within China’s “urban mining” initiative, said Duan. The goal of this strategy is to lift China’s WEEE diversion rate from its current estimated 40 percent level to the 70 or 75 percent range. He said research and funding is going toward additional recovery of precious metals and plastics from WEEE materials.
China’s national and provincial governments also have established eco-parks to reward licensed WEEE recyclers, said Duan. Licensing is easier for businesses in such parks, he added. “In most sectors of the recycling industry [in China], the government is encouraging them to get into these parks,” he stated.
Electronics Recycling Asia 2015 was organized by Switzerland-based ICM AG and held at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore Nov. 10-13.