Paying to Junk TVs, Monitors

SACRAMENTO -- California would become the first state to impose a fee on the sales of computers and televisions to pay for their future disposal, under sweeping legislation aimed at managing hazardous electronic waste.

Beginning in 2004, the state would assess a fee of as much as $30 on the sale of every new computer and TV set to help cities and trash companies finance collection and recycling. The legislation also would require a warning label on every new computer and television to disclose the hazardous materials contained inside, and would establish a public education campaign to persuade consumers to recycle them.

Unknown to many consumers, TV sets and personal computers contain numerous toxic materials. Discarding the growing heaps of outdated models in an environmentally safe manner poses a challenge across the country.

Last year, California quietly prohibited landfills from accepting any more TVs or computer monitors, after concluding they constituted hazardous waste.

Most such items contain four to eight pounds of lead apiece. About 10,000 of them are discarded in the state every day and only an estimated 5% to 15% are recycled. Yet California, like all other states, lacks a strategy for getting rid of them.

Measures by state Sens. Byron Sher of Stanford and Gloria Romero of Los Angeles, both Democrats, would treat the discarded devices like used bottles, cans and tires.

“If you walk into Circuit City or Good Guys today, you are going to find the latest, fastest computer and you know, two or three years from now, it is going to be in the trash somewhere,” Romero said. “We all want the newest technology. It’s out with the old, in with the new. But until the new becomes environmentally friendly, we are ending up with a stockpile of hazardous waste.”

Both measures have cleared the Senate and are in the Assembly, but they are opposed by an array of business interests, leaving their prospects for final passage uncertain.

This week, in fact, both measures nearly died in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, which passed the bills only after stripping them of most details and ordering opponents and supporters to reopen negotiations.

Several computer and television trade groups are working to defeat the bills (SB 1523 and SB 1619), arguing that the state should wait for a national electronics recycling standard. And some in-state manufacturers, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, worry that a California fee would give an edge to out-of-state competitors, such as Gateway and Dell, whose Internet sales might be outside the state’s reach.

‘A Fairness Issue’

“Consumers who purchase computers at retail outlets in California will pay this $30 fee, and consumers who choose to purchase their computers over the Internet will not,” said Heather Bowman of the Electronics Industries Alliance, a Washington trade group active in the California fight.

“That’s a fairness issue. California retailers are already at a disadvantage because of the sales tax [which is not charged on out-of-state Internet purchases], and this would only make it worse.”

Supporters of a state recycling fee, although acknowledging that a national solution would make more sense, say California may have to act first, as it has done on other environmental issues.

They say it is time for computer makers to embrace what they believe is a moral obligation to ensure that the products they sell do not contribute to pollution.

The fee, supporters say, would nurture a growing computer recycling industry and end the technology world’s dirty little secret about what happens to the detritus of the Information Age.

Much of America’s electronic waste now makes its way to China, India and Pakistan, where computers and TV sets are crudely disassembled and scrapped for parts by untrained peasants, polluting ground water and endangering human health, environmentalists assert.

A recent documentary on the practice shot by environmental groups, “Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia,” showed Chinese villagers, including children, scavenging old computers with ID tags from the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The footage surprised Los Angeles school officials, who said they did not know how their computer junk had made it across the Pacific.

“This is an issue that should already have been addressed,” said Sher, who represents much of the Silicon Valley area. “This is a problem that is giving this industry a black eye, not only here but throughout the world.”

Since its inception, one of the central tenets of the computer industry has been that equipment will be replaced early and often as better technology becomes available.

The side effect of that constant turnover--piles upon piles of obsolete computers--is only now attracting government scrutiny.

For years, many consumers handed old computers down to relatives or donated them to charities or schools. But as computer use has skyrocketed and technological progress has continued to soar, those outlets for older computers have begun to disappear.

Many thrift shops have stopped accepting computers and televisions altogether, concluding that chances of finding new users are slim and the cost of discarding them is too steep.

As a result, trash companies report increasing numbers of computers and televisions being discarded. Officials also say there is a “silent stockpile” of millions more in garages and attics around the country, waiting to be discarded.

A recent report by the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board estimated that, in California households alone, there are 6 million computer and TV monitors collecting dust.

“What has become clear in the past decade is that electronics are disposable goods,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, chief sponsor of the measures.

“In practice, computers and televisions are disposable products that, in a few years, become completely worthless.”

Several Western European nations have passed laws requiring electronics recycling, and the European Union has begun to address the problem more broadly, with legislation requiring manufacturers to pay for take-back programs. Japan already has such a law for televisions and appliances.

But the United States, by far the world’s largest consumer of electronic goods, lags behind.

A coalition of industry leaders, environmentalists, recyclers and government officials is working to develop a nationwide solution that would include front-end fees, like those proposed in California. However, the group, the National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative, is not expected to reach consensus for at least another year.

Like several other companies, Panasonic has been working to reduce the number of toxins in its televisions and building them with more reusable materials, as well as forming partnerships with recyclers and government agencies to sponsor take-back programs.

A recent report commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that 40% of the lead found in the nation’s landfills is suspected to have come from electronic equipment, most from the cathode ray tubes found in TV and computer monitors. Lead can leach out of landfills, government studies have shown, polluting surrounding soil and ground water.

Computers also contain small amounts of mercury, cadmium and barium, among other potentially hazardous materials.

While many environmental groups praised California for following the example of Massachusetts and banning TVs and computer monitors from landfills last year, the move surprised many cities and waste haulers, who suddenly found themselves footing the bill for tons of hazardous waste they had no place to send.

“We’ve got this prohibition to send them to landfills, yet there is no place for them to go and they are piling up. It’s leading to a lot of illegal dumping, unfortunately,” said Denise Delmatier, vice president of government affairs at Norcal Waste, one of the state’s largest trash companies.

Norcal is spending $35 to $40 per unit to send computers and televisions to HMR Group, a company that breaks them down and sends the scrap to various recyclers, but Norcal cannot afford to do that forever, Delmatier said.

At HMR Group’s cavernous central processing facility in Sacramento, business is clearly booming since the California landfill ban. Discarded computers and televisions arrive by the trailer load from Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The $30 recycling fee proposed in California is intended to finance grants that would help cities, trash haulers, nonprofit groups and others cover the cost of collecting TVs and computers and, possibly, recycling them. The state would collect the fee and dole out the grants. But San Francisco officials say it costs them nearly $60 just to prepare a wood-paneled television for recycling.

Legality Questioned

Opponents, meanwhile, question whether the state could legally levy such fees on Dell and other out-of-state companies that do business over the Internet.

A recent letter from a state Board of Equalization staff member to a lobbyist for the computer industry lent credence to that argument, concluding there were legal as well as practical problems with collecting fees from companies with no physical presence in the state.

Nonetheless, supporters insist the fee is legally sound and they stress that something must be done to address a problem that is only likely to get worse. “It should be as easy to recycle a computer as it is to buy one. And it should be free,” said Robert Haley, recycling coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment. “Because, otherwise, people are going to continue taking the easy way out, which is to leave these things on a street corner.”