Thea McManus of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offered a summary of the agency’s efforts pertaining to electronics recycling, product stewardship and product design at the ISRI National Convention, which was April 13-16 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
McManus said the EPA is undergoing “some dramatic policy shifts” away from waste management toward materials management spearheaded by the Acting Assistant Administrator Tom Dunne. She added that the agency is moving away from litigation toward collaboration with industry leaders who it had an adversarial relationship with previously.
“Material management gives new meaning to the term ‘useful life’,” McManus said. This approach calls for a minimization of hazardous materials and the energy used in manufacturing. It also gives priority to reuse and recycling.
While electronics make up only 1 percent to 2 percent of the waste stream currently, McManus said that EPA has decided to focus on them because of their rapid growth and the opportunity to reduce mining and conserve resources and because of the potentially hazardous materials that they contain.
McManus said that EPA has identified a number of five-year goals pertaining to electronics, including environmentally sound government purchasing and facilitating access to recycling and reuse options for consumers.
She also outlined the EPA’s projects related to electronics, which includes the E-PEAT program, the Federal Electronics Challenge, Energy Star, Design for the Environment and Plug into E-cycling.
EPA’s EPEAT program, an acronym for Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, is establishing a set of criteria for assess electronic products, a management system for tracking use. McManus said the program’s criteria should be finalized in the spring of 2006.
The Federal Electronics Challenge specifies that government agencies must use EPEAT guidelines when buying electronics. Currently, 80 percent of the federal government has signed onto the challenge, with 12 government agencies signing a Memorandum of Understanding, McManus said.
The EPA’s Energy Star program has added a focus on power adaptors for electronics like laptops, cell phones and digital cameras, calling for a 35 percent increase in efficiency. Currently, 1.5 billion power adaptors are in use in the country, according to McManus.
The EPA’s Design for the Environment is focusing on helping industry identify lead-free solder options, McManus said, while the agency’s Plug into E-cycling program is designed to increase the recycling and reuse of consumer electronics by facilitating consumer access to these services.