18 June 2008 | Luca Del Buono

 

Companies all over the world are starting to realize the positive impact that green business initiatives can have on the bottom line. But for electronics manufacturers, one of the biggest and most-needed improvements is also the most complicated: how to deal with a product at the end of its lifecycle.

There are benefits aplenty to extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs, which require manufacturers to collect and recycle or reuse their products before they end up in landfills.

Aside from the environmental and health benefits of diverting consumer electronics from waste streams, the potential business benefits of EPR are significant: fostering a stronger bond with customers, reducing manufacturing and waste expenses, and reusing resources are a few.

But the challenges of funding, developing and ingraining EPR into a corporate structure are daunting. And in the U.S. especially, states have addressed a failure to map an e-waste solution on the federal level with a patchwork of varying laws, making the process all the more difficult.

Some of the electronics goliaths have sowed their own, successful recycling programs while others have collaborated with other manufacturers. Which path is easiest? And which is the most successful?

The concept of EPR is not a new one and it has been widely adopted by a number of industries since the 1990s, when Germany passed laws requiring packaging manufacturers to be responsible for the packaging waste they produced, clogging much of the country's dwindling landfill space.

Due to the presence of lead and other toxins, electronics -- everything from desktop computers to cell phones and televisions -- pose a significant risk to human health and the environment. In Europe, the waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) directive was passed in 2006 to force manufacturers of electronics to mitigate these risks by taking back and recycling used product in order to divert it from landfills, illegal dumps and unsafe disassembly practices.

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