USEFUL WIRED BLOG

Recession Drives the Greening of the Electronics Industry
By Brian X. Chen EmailNovember 14, 2008 | 5:16:57 PMCategories: Environment

Recycled There's gold in them thar PCs -- not to mention silver, copper, aluminum and other valuable recyclables.

That fact, not a desire to save the planet, is now pushing the tech industry toward "greener" manufacturing and recycling practices. It could mean that there's an environmental silver lining to the mounting economic crisis: Tough times are forcing companies to resort to recycling as a means of recouping costs. These recycling measures are also good public relations in a time when consumers are increasingly eco-conscious -- and they might even be good for the planet.

"We view this waste as a valuable resource, and recycling it is a far better use of it," said Wes Muir, director of communications at Waste Communication Recycle America, which is handling Sony and LG's recycling programs.

Several electronics manufacturers, such as Dell, LG and Sony recently partnered with recycling facilities to offer take-back programs for consumers to freely dispose of their gadgets.

Apple is particularly aggressive with its green message. The company tags its latest line of MacBooks as "The greenest MacBook ever." While Steve Jobs sounds awfully humanitarian, his move toward greener tech is as much for Apple as it is for the environment, said Casey Harrell, a toxics campaigner with environmental group Greenpeace. By making these gadgets safer to recycle, Apple, and other companies making similar decisions, is saving money by reducing the costs of recycling while benefiting from reusing old materials.

Recycling facilities disassemble old gadgets into different parts and sell salvageable materials to brokers, according to Muir. Then, the brokers sell the recycled materials, such as plastics, gold and copper, to tech manufacturers to reuse in new gadgets. Manufacturers are preferring this method because it's substantially less expensive than purchasing newly mined materials.

Just how much a company saves varies depending on the type of gadget being recycled, but Harrell estimates that recycling old electronics could result in up to 4-to-1 cost savings.

"I don't think these companies would be lobbying [greener tech] unless there was a financial incentive," Harrell said. "It's not altruistic, and ultimately we don't care. We want the [cleaner] results, so if they're able to make money off of this ... it's a win-win."

Other than saving money, the industry-wide shift toward cleaner tech is also being driven by new laws regarding electronic waste. In 2003, the European Union passed the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive Act, which requires manufacturers to take responsibility for recycling their products after consumers discard them. In other words, if Sony sells a TV to a European customer, Sony has to take the TV back and recycle it at the end of the device's life. While the directive is only directly affecting Europe, it's spreading to the United States and Asia, too: Many big tech manufacturers operate internationally, and it'd be both inefficient and costly to make an eco-friendly product for Europe and a dirtier version of the same gadget for another country.

New rules regarding hazardous waste have also emerged in the United States -- although they're a bit less demanding than the EU's. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule probibiting the United States from exporting used televisions and computer monitors. This is a small but important step: Older displays contain high amounts of toxics, such as lead contained in cathode ray tubes (CRTs) -- as much as several pounds per TV or monitor.

Tech companies are also marketing cleaner tech to retain positive public relations, as they're feeling the heat from widespread, global concern over the disposal of electronics waste. Currently, environmental groups are still fighting to eliminate e-waste exports to Asian countries. The environmental group Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) claims the majority of U.S. e-waste -- an estimated 20 million pounds -- is collected for recycling and shipped to China, India, South Korea, Nigeria, Malaysia, Mexico, Vietnam and Brazil. The problem? Many of the recycling organizations in these countries are in the "informal sector" -- essentially junk dealers with very little money and few resources. Illustrating the issue, a recent documentary by Current shows recycling workers in China disassembling old gadgets on top of piles of waste.

"We've kind of won the overall war on the direction of chemical phase-out and waste collection," Harrell said. "Now we're bickering about how much and how fast."