Nearly NEPSI Time?

Throughout this decade, a range of stakeholders in the electronics manufacturing and retailing segment, the solid waste/recycling industry and the environmental sector have been taking part in the National Electronic Product Stewardship Initiative (NEPSI). After years of meetings they have reached agreement on several key aspects of how obsolete electronics should be handled.

Cat Wilt, NEPSI program director and a University of Tennessee senior research associate, says the group is close to concluding that it has reached as much consensus as possible, and may soon be willing to make recommendations for U.S. legislators to bring to Congress.

“NEPSI still doesn’t have the final solution,” she told attendees of the E-Scrap 2004 conference, which took place in Minneapolis in October.

She noted, though, that NEPSI participation from the U.S. EPA was cut off in November of 2003, in part because the group did not want to be involved in the process as it came closer to the point of crafting legislative proposals.

While this created a funding challenge, it has also spurred NEPSI participants to hammer out some further agreement on how a national computer recycling plan might work. But an important point of disagreement—how funding for such a program would be structured—remains.

According to Wilt, the various stakeholders have agreed that any such plan will cover computers (including laptops), monitors, TVs and computer peripherals; that it will involve complying with hazardous waste regulations and minimum wage laws and restrict exporting to whole units and scrap commodities; and that a national coordinating entity (NCE) would manage the program—possibly the Mid-Atlantic Recycling Center for End-of-Life Electronics in the Polymer Alliance Zone in West Virginia.

But the source of disagreement, what NEPSI refers to as the financing mechanism, is a critical one. “There is recognition that a NEPSI agreement [isn’t] possible until this is resolved,” said Wilt.

NEPSI stakeholders are considering a funding arrangement with a visible fee at the point of sale of new electronics items that provides flexibility in how the funds collected are managed. Some manufacturers could use collected fees to run their own take-back programs while others could contribute to a pooled program.

Wilt says NEPSI stakeholders are about ready to agree that no further agreement is likely. She said the group’s goal is to provide recommendations to federal legislators by late January of 2005. Wilt says there are several members of Congress who are “very, very interested in this issue; I get calls from staffers regularly.”

Ultimately, Wilt says that even if NEPSI cannot endorse a comprehensive system, “it gathered a tremendous amount of data. I think there will be a national solution [and] I think NEPSI laid the groundwork for it.”