Beyond 50% Waste Diversion…

Keynote Speech from the Ecology Center's "30 Years of Curbside Recycling" celebration.

November 20, 2003
Beverley Thorpe
Bev@cleanproduction.org
514/484-8647

Thirty Years from now – things could be looking up.

Things have moved on since 1973. Awareness has risen but so has waste. North Americans still throw out more garbage than any other people on earth. Our waste is also becoming more hazardous; the products we buy become obsolete quicker and our recycling attempts are not keeping up with the problem. As a result, the tonnage of product waste landfilled and incinerated has grown by 19.2 million tons since 1980. Research now details increased cancer rates next to landfills and incinerators both here and in countries that we export our waste to.

Traditionally the answer has been to recycle. Or to reduce, reuse and recycle. But something is preventing this from being a success. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency the rate of recycling has stagnated at 27% since 1997 and for some materials the rate is extremely low. Plastics recycling still only accounts for less than 5%. Communities can be successful at recycling paper, cardboard, a few plastic types, glass and organic waste. But there is much that cannot be recycled, that has no market and that is hazardous.

So how will things look thirty years from now? Will we see a zero waste society in the year 2033? Can we have a Closed Loop Society where all packaging, pizza boxes, diapers, old sofas, carpets, flooring, broken toys, and defunct electronic products are returned for safe recycling? Will we see the end of leaking landfills, incinerators spewing dioxins into ash and air and the end to the transport of garbage to other states and countries? Can we cut the amount of waste we generate?
When I think of where we might be thirty years from now I think of two other important revolutionary goals. I think of the environmental goal of northern European countries to eliminate all hazardous emissions into the environment by one generation, in other words by the year 2020.

But to achieve this revolutionary goal, something even more revolutionary has been proposed: a complete overhaul of the entire chemical industry in Europe. In essence The European Environment Commission is calling on the chemical industry to finally be accountable for all their chemicals in commerce. It will no doubt surprise you to discover that over 95% of all existing chemicals in the products we buy on a regular basis have no environmental or health data. Yes, it is hard to believe but true – the chemical industry was busy manufacturing chemicals in post World War II Europe and North America but never needed to test if these chemicals were safe to living systems.

The result is that since Rachel Carson’s revelations in 1962 that chemicals could, indeed, be a threat to life, we discover new health and environmental assaults every few years.

What the new EU legislation will do is make the chemical industry supply all this missing environmental and health data for each chemical they have on the market. Then if any chemical is found to be a of high concern because it shows itself to be a carcinogen, a reproductive toxin or a hormone disrupter, it will have to go through a strict authorization process and only be allowed on the market if the user can show it is needed by society and can be strictly controlled. It is anticipated that this could lead to the phase out of at least 1500 hazardous substances and their substitution by safer chemicals in commerce. Unfortunately the new draft European chemical policy is being actively opposed by the American Chemistry Council and the Bush administration, as well as the chemical producers in Europe. So environmental groups round the country here in the US are drawing together to maintain a counter pressure and send the message to Brussels that not all Americans oppose such progressive legislation. We have reason to support such European initiatives because we too need to change the way we control chemicals in this country. It all comes down to company accountability and producers’ responsibility.

Recent revelations show that women in the Bay Area have some of the highest body burdens in the world of hazardous chemicals called poly brominated diphenyl ethers – chemicals which are used as flame retardants in polyurethane foams, carpet backings and electronic equipment. They are in the furniture you sit on; they may be in the plastic casings and keyboards or mouse of your computers, and may be mixed into the plastic housings of your TVs, and VCRs.

The levels in the North American public are doubling every two to five years and we are way off the scale in relation to European contamination levels. These chemicals act very similarly to PCBs. They affect the nervous system, bind to the thyroid and have been implicated in learning disabilities. We really don’t know enough about the dangers of these chemicals because, remember, the chemical industry never had to supply the data, even while it was being mixed into foam for furnishings and toys. By the way when Sweden discovered rising levels in breast milk they banned these chemicals, we in the USA and Canada have no regulation except for the recently passed state legislation in California to phase out two of these chemicals by the year 2008. You are the only state in this country to begin dealing with this chemical crisis. Congratulations.

So why talk about chemicals when we are here talking about waste prevention and recycling and are here to recognize the success of curbside recycling and chart the way forward? The reason I talk about chemicals and hazardous materials is because I believe we need to clean up our products if we want to increase our recycling rates. To truly close the loop on material flow in our society, and achieve zero waste we need a new strategy and a new way of thinking. We need to get our products designed for reuse and safe recycling. It comes down to company accountability and producer responsibility.Our current one way flow of hazardous materials in products doesn’t change a thing. It simply perpetuates our exposure and our children’s exposure to hazardous materials from the time they are manufactured --to their use in our homes --and then when they dumped or burned, creating the problem of hazardous leachate from landfills and hazardous emissions and ash from incinerators. Hazardous chemicals are also a reason why some recycling doesn’t take place – for instance one reason plastics from electronic waste is not handled by recyclers in Europe is that they don’t know if these plastics contain brominated flame retardants. In fact one of the first published studies of the rapid uptake of these chemicals in the human body was a 1999 study in Sweden which showed computer recyclers had high levels of PBDEs in their blood. The dust and off-gassing from the recycling process was contaminating the workers.

So how do we get producers to design safe and sustainable products? And how do we increase our reuse and recycling of materials? Well, we simply need to put the feedback loop for waste management back onto the producers and ask them to achieve high recycling rates. Think about it, if you had physical and financial responsibility for your product waste you would rethink your product design. You would not want the headache of having hazardous materials land back on your lap. You would want products that would be easily recycled and able to be disassembled. You would also want to design products for reuse and upgradability because it would save you money. Putting the feedback loop onto producers is important because only the producer can decide what chemicals and materials will be used and how the product will be designed. In fact, eighty percent of a typical product's environmental impact is determined by its design.

This practice is called Extended Producer Responsibility or Producer Take Back for short. It’s a development that began in earnest back in the 1990s and is becoming increasingly popular. Producer take back is an essential strategy to reverse our escalating waste generation and phase out hazardous chemicals in products by making manufacturers responsible for the environmentally friendly management of their product when it reaches the end of its productive life.

It’s also more fair. It takes waste management costs off the backs of local government and municipalities and puts the cost back onto the producer of the product. The producer then absorbs the costs or raises the product price. Of course consumers may end up paying more for a product, but it is a more efficient and equitable method rather than having the taxpayer and governments pay to manage end of life products. This way, someone who owns three cars, four TVs and 2 computers will contribute more to the total waste management costs than someone who owns a bike, one TV and a laptop. In other words people who generate more product waste may pay proportionately more. Or, as in Japan, the producers simply top up the cost paid by consumers. It’s up to the producer to decide.

The great thing about this is that local governments can save money and redirect many of these costs into other priority areas such as schools, teachers’ salaries and whatever else is good for society at large. EPR couldn’t be more timely: Local governments in the US currently spend an estimated $43.5 billion per year managing product waste. At the same time state and local governments are facing deficits of an unprecedented scale-- deeper than they have been any time in the last half century. States are facing budget deficits in the range of $70 billion to $85 billion for state fiscal year 2004. And this is on top of previous year deficits.

EPR has even been endorsed by the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 32 countries which exists to promote strategies that work within the global economy. The OECD responded positively to the idea of producer responsibility as an economically efficient way to internalize the cost of product waste. So what does an EPR system look like and how is it different to what happens now?

Let’s take packaging. Germany realized it had to solve its packaging waste problem – landfills were running out, they couldn’t ship their waste to East Germany anymore, and the East Germans were beginning to buy more products and generate more waste once the Berlin Wall came down. The Green Party was in power and consumers were leaving their packaging at the cash registers because they didn’t want to deal with it when they got home.

So in 1990 Germany passed the Packaging Ordinance which made retailers responsible for high recycling rates for packaging and high refillable rates for beverage containers.
(show slide) Here you can see the recycling rates that industry had to achieve. On top of this were refillable rates for beverage of 75%.

Why retailers you may ask? It was a smart move. The fillers, that is the brand names, eventually became responsible for making sure this was done because they continuously had the retailers on their backs telling them to meet these targets and cut costs because retailers didn’t want the cost of products on their shelves to go up. Fillers found it beneficial to take part in a collective scheme which would guarantee proper recycling and the ability to meet their reuse and recycling rates. Anyone who joined this scheme, then had the right to put the ‘green dot’ logo on their products to tell consumers that their packaging would indeed be refilled and recycled.

The Green Dot system lead to a change in material choice. Each filler has to pay a fee depending on the type of materials used for packaging, eg fees for plastic or composite materials are higher than fees for cardboard or glass. So fillers cut costs by choosing to use less packaging, redesigning their products to get rid of unnecessary secondary packaging such as blister packs, and choosing more recyclable materials such as cardboard over plastic. Consumers put all packaging into separate yellow bins or bags and these are collected separately from the rest of the waste stream. Industry – through packaging fees – pays for all collection costs from households and recycling costs.

Since the fillers have become responsible for the cost of packaging, the use of composites has been reduced by 50% and plastics use in packaging fell from 40% (by volume) to 27% in favour of paper/carton and tinplate. Also seen within the plastic packaging sector were shifts away from Polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC) to PE and PP which is easier to recycle.

In total between 1991-1997, the Green Dot system achieved a 3% annual reduction in packaging which clearly reversed the previous 2-4% increase per year trend prior to this legislation. Total packaging has been reduced by 1 million tonnes, a per capita reduction of 15 kg. For comparison, between 1991 and1995, when Green Dot packaging decreased 14% during the same period in the USA, our packaging waste increased 13%. In fact, in recent years companies in this country have increased the weight of their packaging, shifting from reusable to disposable products, and have increased the costs of recycling by adding pigments to milk jugs and adhesives to labels that are incompatible with recycling processes. Recycling of glass bottles in the USA declined in 1997 and total container recycling fell 7.6 percent.The German Packaging Ordinance has also stimulated new technologies for recycling of packaging materials making Germany a world leader in new technologies.

One product stream which is being dealt with in Europe and Japan and which has particular relevance to California is that of waste from electronic and electrical equipment. This covers all products that you effectively plug into the wall: everything from stoves and refrigerators to VCRs, computers, washing machines, TVs, cell phones and electronic toothbrushes.

In the 1990’s the problem of electronic waste became an issue in countries with decreasing landfill space such as Japan and the European Union. Electronic waste is growing 3 times faster than other municipal waste streams – and it’s hazardous. The Europeans decided something had to be done because over 90 percent of this waste was going to incinerators and landfills instead of being reused or recycled.

Now in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Austria or in Switzerland, the consumer can take back their old electrical products to the retailer free of charge when buying a new one. Or they can drop it off at a local collection point. The manufacturers take it from there, ship it to a recycling facility and show they have met the required recycling targets in the legislation. By 2005 all European countries must ensure that there are systems in place, financed by producers, to separately collect electrical and electronic waste from end users. Retailers are supposed to provide free take-back on and “old for new” basis.

The legislation requires reuse/recycling rates of between 50% (for toys, tools and lighting) and up to 75% for large household appliances. What is more when producers put a new product on the market, they must provide a financial “guarantee” that waste management of the product will be paid for – in case they go out of business before the product becomes a waste.

By July 2006 no new equipment put on the market may contain lead, mercury, cadmium, or hexavalent chromium. Two types of flame retardants – including the notorious PBDEs are also prohibited. All these regulations apply to importers – so American companies wanting to do business in Europe must also phase out these hazardous materials.

What did the electronic industry think of this? Progressive industry leaders pushed for legislation that would cover all companies and retailers in Europe and that would allow them to have the choice to collect their own equipment and not be responsible for their competitors’ waste stream.
When the WEEE Directive was being drafted the following companies lobbied extensively for individual responsibility:   Electrolux,  HP, Ericsson, ICL, Nokia, IBM, Gillette, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Agilent  Technologies.  They stated in a letter dated May 23, 2001 that "A producer, as  well as an importer, should assume financial responsibility for the recyling of  the products intended for households.  This will encourage design for the  environment in product development, as well as competition in the  waste/recycling industry."  This makes sense if you are a company that pays special attention to the choice of safe materials and chemicals. For instance, Electrolux, the largest producer of kitchen appliances in the world, pushed hard for individual responsibility. They had phased out the use of CFCs years before many of their competitors did and so did not want to have to have these dirtier products enter their recycling system. In effect, the use of hazardous materials increases the recycling costs. And this gets us back to our wish for cleaner products in a closed loop system. EPR definitely drives more sustainable product design.

Industry have had to comply with the Restriction on hazardous materials and with the recycling targets. The result of these and other EPR legislation, such as the legislation on end of life vehicles which also stipulates tough recycling rates and the phase out of hazardous materials, has been better design.

For example, the next generation of Apple products will move away from plastic polycarbonate housing and towards metal housing, using an aluminium alloy. The use of metals provides for better end-of-life management (than plastics), provides a better heat sink (than plastics with hazardous flame retardant chemicals) and enables the product life to be extended. In addition, the use of lacquers in metal finishes does not cause problems during smelting, whereas the use of lacquers on plastics renders the plastic non-recyclable. The next generation of Apple laptop, will also have a detachable keyboard to enable access to RAM and motherboard for upgrading and disassembly at end of life.

A survey of auto makers in Europe and Japan, where EPR for end of life autos exist, reveals that in order to increase the recyclability of the plastic portion of the car, some manufacturers, such as Nissan, have reduced the variety of plastics used for different parts of the car. One manufacturer, Toyota, succeeded in developing specific plastics that can be recycled for exactly the same purpose without degrading the quality.

So what about EPR here at home?

There are currently over 20 state initiatives to bring some kind of EPR legislation in for computer waste. In Massachusetts over 130 municipalities support the state’s Computer Take Back Bill.
As one local government official explained: “The city of Quincy is responsible for recycling an excess of 25,000 tons per year of computer monitors and televisions, costing the taxpayers more than $50,000. That money would have saved the teacher we needed to preserve the elementary music program and a high school security person who were both cut from the budget last year.”

In September this year California passed legislation to deal with monitors and computer displays which has some aspects of EPR legislation but does not really make the producers responsible for handling this waste stream. The legislation in State Bill 20 establishes a front end recycling fee of between $6 to $10 paid by consumers on new products. This money then will go into state coffers to fund the collection and recycling of this e-waste. The good thing about the bill is that it includes the same phase out provisions stipulated in the European legislation and does reduce the strain on the state’s waste budget. However the bad thing is that the fee may not be sufficient to pay for all the costs of advertising, collection, transport and recycling. It also sets no recycling targets and applies only to monitors and displays, not the CPU or any other electronic waste. Finally it supplies no feedback loop to the producers to stimulate better future design. But it is a beginning. Now we need to ensure that future legislation has all these criteria put back in.

So the future CAN be one of safer design and better recycling. Governments increasingly realize the cost savings to be had by making producers internalize their waste management costs. Product designers see the creative challenges that await them and some industries have already seen the competitive edge this gives them.

My organization, Clean Production Action, is about to publish our Citizen’s Guide to Producer Take Back in January. It is a guide for government officials, waste activists and supportive industry representatives. It will detail how to implement good Extended Producer Responsibility legislation by providing case studies of how it is being done elsewhere.

In the meantime there are ways to push EPR:

1. Quantify how much money is currently being spent to manage waste from priority waste streams
2. Identify which waste streams are not currently handled by recycling programs.
3. Resolve any legal problems that may hinder direct producer takeback legislation
4. Bring stakeholders to the table
5. Ensure you are aware of the extent of EPR programs in other countries.
6. If you are a local government official, sign a resolution in support of a state EPR bill.
7. If you are a waste activist or community recycling advocate work with government officials to implement EPR systems
8. Use your market power. If you are a procurement officer demand EPR for your end of life products.

Then maybe we will truly see the beginning of safer products and less waste. And in 2033 I hope to be back here with you all to celebrate Berkeley’s success in achieving clean production and zero waste.

Thank you.
For more information visit our website at http://www.cleanproduction.org.