The purchasing, use and disposal of electronics all impact populations across the globe in terms of sustainable economic development, particularly in urban enclaves.
by Wayne Rifer, Green Electronics Council
The revolution in information and communication technology is vastly expanding opportunities in work and play for billions of people worldwide. High technology product manufacturing and call centers are leveling the playing field for developing countries while supplying more sustainable economic development than previously imaginable.
At the same time, the environment sustains a substantial impact from these new products. High-tech products are the most resource intensive of all consumer products. For example, a typical chip in a computer requires 600 times its weight in fossil fuel to produce. In comparison, a car requires only one or two times its weight. With the energy intensity of these products, it is staggering to realize that according to market projections, by 2020 there will be 4 billion PCs in use worldwide.
The unfortunate reality is that economic forces now drive 50-80 percent of U.S.-generated waste from these short-lived products into the informal recycling sector in Asia. This informal recycling is widely known to lack basic worker safety precautions. Frequently, workers are directly exposed to toxic materials embodied in these products, including lead, cadmium, mercury and brominated organic compounds.
While these environmental and human health impacts are of great concern, the greening of the information technology (IT) world is most definitely underway. The environmental impacts of electronic products’ energy usage, toxic content, resource utilization and end-of-life disposal are increasingly familiar to the public, businesses, institutions and to manufacturers of these products. Environmentally responsible life-cycle management of high-technology products is increasingly feasible, and it is a shared responsibility for all who benefit from these empowering communication and information management services.
The one act that can most influence whether electronic products are made more environmentally friendly is the act of purchasing, most especially purchasing by institutions, which routinely specify characteristics of the products they wish to purchase. Increasingly, institutional purchasers are specifying environmental performance. But this can be highly technical and subject to opinion. How can a purchaser know what is best to buy? What about after purchase? How can users know they are using their equipment most responsibly? And, how can an asset disposition manager know he is doing the right thing with out-of-service equipment?
Purchasing environmentally responsible electronics
A tool is available for institutional purchasers in business and government to help them make the ‘right’ IT purchasing decisions. The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) is a stakeholder-developed, ANSI-accredited purchasing tool for environmentally preferable electronic products. Launched in 2006, EPEAT defines required environmental criteria that all products must meet to be on its registry. It also defines optional criteria that allows products to earn extra points and achieve three tiers of superior environmental performance in bronze, silver or gold.
EPEAT criteria addresses all life-cycle aspects of products and is organized in eight categories:
- reduce/eliminate environmentally sensitive materials
- eliminate lead in solder or mercury in lamps
- material selection
- incorporate recycled or bio-based content
- design for end-of-life
- design the product for effective recycling
- product longevity/lifecycle extension
- provide spare parts and warranties
- energy conservation.
- corporate performance
- eliminate toxics in packaging
Meeting standards
EPEAT has gained broad support and marketplace power. A diverse group of stakeholders designed and implemented EPEAT through a consensus process. This process, funded by the U.S. EPA and managed by a nonprofit organization called Zero Waste Alliance, empowered stakeholders to decide what EPEAT would be, how it would work and what the environmental criteria should be. The consequence of empowerment is ownership and with that, support. EPEAT has benefited from that support with strong manufacturer participation, widespread purchaser adoption, and governmental and non-governmental organization (NGO) endorsement.
Most notably, the U.S. federal government is bound by internal regulations to purchase its IT equipment off the EPEAT Registry. Consequently, manufacturers find that making sure their products meet the EPEAT environmental standard is a condition of access to the federal market, as well as markets for many other governments, organizations, institutions and large businesses.
All purchasers need to specify that they want to purchase EPEAT-registered products. IT suppliers know what that means and can meet the need with a great variety of competitively priced products.
EPEAT was developed in the context of increasing public interest in protecting the environment. These days we see claims of environmental merit on products everywhere we turn. Every other product we buy claims to be natural, environmentally friendly or sustainable. How can we be sure?
U.S. federal government is bound by internal regulations to purchase its IT equipment off the EPEAT Registry.
Assuring environmental claims are credible
Because there is money to be made in the “sustainability”market, it is essential purchasers look behind an environmental claim. A credible standard and independent verification of a manufacturer’s claim are the essential elements. These elements are built into EPEAT and other credible, third-party environmental “labels.” Fortunately, this is not hard, because a credible environmental program will also be transparent, just like EPEAT. Look for a standard that has been vetted with stakeholders and a rigorous system for verification of manufacturer claims. Though EPEAT is being pulled into new products and new markets, it is currently limited to desktop computers, notebook computers and monitors. Through further stakeholder consensus, EPEAT will expand to cover imaging devices, televisions and other electronics.
Studies have shown that for most of our household appliances, the greatest environmental impact comes from their use, i.e., the energy it takes to run them. A refrigerator has four times as much impact on the environment from its use than from its manufacture and final disposal added together. But for high-tech equipment, those numbers are reversed. This is why purchasing an environmentally preferable computer is important.
Using high-tech products
Using computers is quite important from the perspective of energy consumption. The single most important thing a user can do is to make sure that the computer is not wasting energy while it is waiting for us to do something. U.S. Energy Starr certification, a condition of all EPEAT Registered products, assures that equipment has low-power usage modes and that it automatically slips into those modes when it is waiting. The problem is that many users turn off those energy-saving modes. This not only costs your company money, but it also pushes us quicker into a climate-altered world. Users should make sure that power-saving capability is activated at all times.
When it comes to the end-of-life of these products, the responsible reuse and recycling of electronics is a key contributor to their overall environmental impact. There are valuable resources embedded in high-tech equipment that makes it do its magic. Those resources can either be buried in a landfill after three or four years of utility, or they can be captured and reused. There is a strong and growing industry that recovers usable components and recycles the precious metals and plastics in electronic products. Take-back and recycling service comes with EPEAT-registered products for institutions and businesses.
At the same time, there are an increasing number of localities requiring manufacturers to recycle their products for free. This is happening under a new policy trend called Producer Responsibility. The principle is that if producers are responsible for the financial costs of the end-of-life for their products, they will design them so the costs and environmental impacts that go along with them are reduced.
This policy is being increasingly applied to other types of products such as automobiles, paints, pesticides and packaging. It is happening quickly in Europe, and somewhat more slowly in the United States through state legislation. Twelve states now have e-waste laws. Generally, though not in all cases, legislation for electronics recycling provides free services only for consumers. This leaves businesses the choice of either arranging for recycling on their own or asking their product suppliers to include it in their offerings when they sell new products.
Choosing an electronics recycler
It is critical to realize that not all recycling is equal. The export of electronics to low-cost, informal recycling in Asia is a well-documented environmental and human tragedy. It is also a liability for the generators of the waste electronics, both financially and brand-wise to the company’s good name. The EPA is trying, unsuccessfully so far, to get stakeholders to agree on voluntary standards that electronics recyclers must meet to be recognized. If this is finalized and an audit system is put in place, then asset disposition managers will choose to do business only with verifiably responsible recyclers. In the meantime, businesses can obtain responsible recycling through purchasing EPEAT products or specify recyclers follow a strict program endorsed by environmental organizations. The most prominent such system is an Electronics Recyclers Pledge that is managed, though not verified, by a group of environmental organizations called the Electronics Take-Back Campaign. You can also look for recyclers that are audited for compliance with other systems, including the U.S. RPA Plug-in to E-cycling Guidelines or the electronics recycler certification system of the trade association Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, RIOS. If we all purchase environmentally preferable products, use them efficiently and dispose of them responsibly, will we assure that our ICT (information and communications technology) world is sustainable.
ICT products have two troubling characteristics from a sustainability perspective. One, they are inherently very resource intensive – in embedded energy and precious metals – and two, they are short lived. The resource churn needed to supply the world’s future population of 10-plus billion people, for all time, with the high-tech gadgets that we enjoy today is boundless.
The electronics industry, in cooperation with government and environmental professionals, is doing an excellent job in making its products more green and should be recognized for that. We have a long way to go before our high-tech world is truly sustainable as new models for providing ICT services need to be developed. Meanwhile, organizations like the Green Electronics Council are working with industry, government and others to fashion that better world.