Our landfills are wasting away

Disposing of unwanted electronic equipment has become an issue that gets bigger every day. Much of it contains lead, cadmium and mercury and other 'nasties' that, if planted in landfill, are always in danger of leaching into a water supply. But moves already afoot to recycle computers, one of the biggest users of electronics, are in danger of stalling. Here, David Braue looks into why landfills are still gobbling up electronic waste at an alarming level.

It's not often that computer manufacturers arouse the wrath of a global political power, but recent protests by Greenpeace against IT vendor HP saw just that situation as the company was mocked as 'highly polluting' for the high amount of lead and other hazardous substances in its equipment.

Ironically, however, it is HP that has led the latest round of initiatives designed to resolve the massive imbalance between the flood of new computer equipment - more than 875,000 computers were sold during the third quarter last year alone, according to IDC - and the quantity of old gear being repurposed or stripped for scrap.

Lead, one of the most environmentally destructive components of ewaste, is gradually being phased out of monitors and many other electronic devices, thanks largely to the awareness of HP and other vendors.

HP has taken its commitment to environmental improvement even further by signing agreements with the government environment departments in Victoria and NSW.

These agreements pledge the company's participation in a range of initiatives designed to ensure that old computer waste doesn't end up poisoning the country's landfills. The NSW compact, in particular, is highly prescriptive, with a formal three-year agreement between the two organisations committing HP to maintaining an advocacy role for corporate responsibility in ewaste initiatives.

"We don't take these compacts lightly," says David Trewin, manager for business partnerships with the NSW Department of the Environment and Conservation (DEC).

"They're not just the signing of a bit of paper. For us, they're not about business as usual; they're about our business partner making commitments to do things that will demonstrate leadership in the sector, do something special to accelerate sustainability work and really make a tangible difference."

The involvement of government offered appeal in convincing HP to commit its environmental ambitions to paper, says Annukka Sairanen, HP's environmental manager for the South Pacific.

"Our belief is that the best environmental outcomes come from projects that are based on shared responsibility," she explains.

"We can facilitate the product to be designed in an environmentally responsible way and can facilitate development of recycling programs, but at the end of the day, success across the whole [ewaste] life cycle does depend on the rest of the industry players too."

Tangibly reducing the flow of ewaste has proved difficult time and again for private recyclers, many of whom have gone out of business long before they could gather enough momentum to make their processes commercially viable.

Last year, however, saw a surge in new initiatives that are once again seeking to build a viable system for recycling ewaste.

First to market in this latest tranche was Dell Computer, which launched a computer recycling program in 2003 but quickly aborted it after its recycling partner went under. Dell's program was relaunched in late 2004, offering consumers free equipment takeback when they buy a new system or, in a pilot program with recycling partner MRI, allowing Sydney and Melbourne customers to recycle equipment for a $10 (drop-off) or $36 (pick-up) fee.

Factor in HP's government partnerships and a vendor-free program launched by waste management provider Collex, and the past year has seen the launch of no fewer than three separate ewaste initiatives.

They may not have solved Australia's ewaste program yet, but if nothing else, they've proved that Australia has significant pent-up demand for an effective ewaste recycling program.

Dell's program was so successful - recycling 20 tonnes in the first half of 2005 - that the company revised its 2005 forecasts upwards by 50% and still met its target of 60 tonnes of equipment recycled by December 1.

Much of that came from a one-day event at Sydney's Cromer High School which attracted 250 people, who dropped off 10 tonnes of old equipment.

Trials in other areas have shown similar enthusiasm from consumers: for example, Sustainability Victoria's Byteback program, sponsored by HP in conjunction with the City of Boroondara and Sims e-Waste, received more than 8000 pieces of old equipment, diverting 79 tonnes of ewaste from landfills in its first four months of operation.

Fully 15 years after Microsoft Windows 3.0 brought computing into the mainstream, however, Australia's PC industry has still failed to provide an ewaste management scheme capable of more than a token reduction in the net quantity of computer gear heading into Australia's landfills.

Economics likely play a part here, since the nominal residual value of most computing equipment means handling of equipment alone is a loss exercise.

And, without legislative pressure such as that imposed by product stewardship laws in places like Europe and Japan, there is little incentive for Australian vendors to wear that loss.

Spreading the cost of ewaste management fairly across the industry has been a major issue for peak vendor body the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), whose environmental interest group has spent the past two years working with AIIA members to formulate a broadly acceptable ewaste management plan.

That plan was submitted to government authorities just before the end of 2005 and a positive response could soon see preliminary movement towards a more overreaching recycling program.

Whether that positive response ever comes, however, will depend on the success of proposals such as which vendors would bundle a recycling fee into the upfront price of all the systems they sell. That would help offset their cost in equipment takeback later on, but James McAdam, the AIIA's general manager of strategy and policy services, says the body's membership is concerned that no-name 'whitebox' vendors - whose products make up around half Australian computer sales - might ignore the surcharge, gaining a further competitive advantage over the one they already enjoy by undercutting the name brands' prices.

"The whitebox industry creates problems for any takeback scheme," says McAdam. "You want to be sure everyone is competing on a level playing field, so any scheme has to deal with the whitebox part of the industry as well as brand names.

"The other issue is dealing with 'orphan waste' [old equipment from now defunct vendors]; we would contend that it is not the role of our members to pay for historic waste."

Orphan waste, which tends to flood into one-off takeback schemes after well-intentioned consumers empty out sheds and boxes in garages, is the big unknown in ewaste recycling schemes, since it offers zero economic value for vendors but carries its own cost.

Just how big an issue orphan and whitebox ewaste is, however, depends on where you look. Just 7% of equipment run through Victoria's Byteback program, for example, is from non name-brand vendors while just 4% is orphan waste. That's a significant contrast to Dell's program, in which just 20% of returned equipment was name-brand ewaste.

If today's vendors grudgingly accept their own equipment but are philosophically opposed to handling the masses of other gear that's out there, can an effective ewaste program ever get off the ground? Here, perhaps, is where government involvement may be most effective - and why HP's compact with the NSW government is such an important step forward.

With the philosophical if qualified support of major vendors, government involvement in development of ewaste programs may also help bring together the other major piece of the puzzle - the recyclers themselves. Time, and the experience of Dell and others, has shown that small ewaste recyclers lack the efficiency to remain viable while handling very low volumes of equipment. In a classic chicken-and-egg scenario, however, further investment in recycling capacity will only come when volumes increase.

Jon Ward, manager of business and industry programs with Sustainability Victoria, concedes this is a challenge, but he is confident the positive experience with Byteback has proved that the model can work. "In demonstrating a cost-effective model of how government and corporations can successfully deliver these services, Byteback has shown that the costs are not as significant as some estimates had placed it," he explains.

"At the moment, we don't really have the resources in the waste management industry to be able to recycle the computers that would come through a massive takeback scheme. However, by giving us information on how we can manage issues such as the cost of logistics and disposal, Byteback is helping give the waste industry more confidence to invest in the future."

Whether that investment will come, remains to be seen; certainly, it would be more likely if government intervention promised to deliver the kind of volumes that have so far been lacking. Although the pro-business coalition government is unlikely to mandate ewaste recycling, the tone of its dialogue may slowly become more forceful. State and federal ministers, for example, are working with the federal Environment Protection and Heritage Council to hammer out a co-regulatory ewaste management framework that Ward believes could produce relevant legislation within 12 to 18 months.

In that time, Trewin says the NSW DEC is likely to ink several more compacts with leading players in IT and other industries, all of whom will pick up the banner to promote environmental responsibility.

Even as more companies come on board on paper, however, the limited programs now in place will likely represent the extent of ewaste recycling in Australia for now.

That's fine for HP, which has positioned ewaste reduction as one of its core corporate citizenship priorities. Whether other companies follow suit will remain to be seen. In the end, with PC margins chronically tight and ewaste management's future still so hazy, even government partnerships may struggle to convince major players to come to the table. That outcome would, most unfortunately, mean more of the same for an industry that's only slowly awakening to the problem it is creating.