Toward Greener Electronics
Listen to a story by The World’s tech correspondent Clark Boyd, followed by our interview with Sarah O’Brien. She’s with the Green Electronics Council, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that’s trying to make the global electronics industry go green.
O’Brien is our guest in this Science Forum discussion. As the communications director for the Green Electronics Council, she works with electronics companies to help them adopt environmentally friendly standards for their manufacturing processes. O’Brien also works with institutions and businesses to help them buy greener electronic products.
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That’s why the U.S Environmental Protection Agency helped develop a set of standards to measure the green-ness of electronic goods. Those standards make up the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, or EPEAT, which the Green Electronics Council uses to rate computers, printers, and other electronic products.
Organizations in some 40 countries now purchase only EPEAT certified electronics. O’Brien says individual consumers should also consider the environmental impact of the computers and other gadgets they buy.
You can learn more about efforts to green the electronics industry. Just bring your thoughts and questions to Sarah O’Brien. The conversation is just to the right.
- Would you pay more to buy a greener laptop or monitor?
- EPEAT doesn’t account for human rights abuses. How can we ensure that the electronics we buy don’t come from mines or factories that exploit their workers?
- When it comes time to dispose of an old computer or cell phone, how can you do so in an environmentally responsible way?
Additional Resources:
- Most electronic goods end up being improperly disposed of in developing countries, threatening the environment there.
- In 1992 several countries signed the Basel Convention, a treaty to reduce e-waste. The United States has not ratified it.
- The Basel Action Network is a non-profit organization that works to reduce e-waste.
- Listen to our story about efforts to track the environmental footprint of other consumer goods here.
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Do you have any involvement with the electronic recycling industry. There seems to be a great need for this type of business. Do you know where I could get information on starting up something like this.
Hi Marybeth -
EPEAT requires manufacturers to take back and responsibly recycle products. There is a pressing need for environmentally and socially responsible e-waste recycling services. Many companies do not handle materials in a responsible fashion, so they all too often end up dumped in developing countries, disposed of as unregulated trash, or disassembled by workers without worker protections or environmental safeguards.
ESCrap News is an excellent source of information on electronics recycling – http://www.resource-recycling.com/esn_mag .
There are two leading sets of US guidelines for responsible recycling –
The E-Stewards certification program: http://e-stewards.org/ and
Responsible Recycling (“R2″) guidelines, http://www.epa.gov/osw/inforesources/news/2009news/08-r2.htm
Does your rating system also take into account conflict minerals? What do you know about green materials from highly contested areas in Africa? Is there any way to track these things?
Hi Emily –
I cannot claim any deep expertise on “conflict minerals” – I do know there are organizations working very hard to reduce the violence associated with extraction and sale of some rare minerals, with a special focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo.I believe an amendment was successfully added to the Financial Reform bill recently in the Senate (S 3217).
Legislative or treaty actions may be the best approach to this complex issue. It is unlikely to be possible to identify materials’ origins by testing after they are in use in components and whole products, so it would be difficult to address them through a product-focused purchasing standard like EPEAT.
I just wanted to add a quick clarification on the standards that underpin the EPEAT system. The criteria that EPEAT uses to rate products are contained in the Institute of Electrical and Electrnic Engineers’ IEEE 1680.1 Standard for the Environmental Assessment of Personal Computer Products. The functioning of the registration process, rating based on criteria met and other operational frameworks are contained in IEEE 1680 – known as the ‘umbrella standard’, which governs application of the product-specific criteria in 1680.1 (and the upcoming 1680.2 Imaging Equipment and 1680.3 Televisions standards). The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers is the world’s largest association of professionals in technology fields.
Hi Sarah —
Clark Boyd here. I was the reporter in Brussels who did the piece on United Pepper, and their efforts to make greener electronics. Can you outline briefly the differences between the US and Europe when it comes to recycling? Having lived here for a while now, it seems that the rules about recycling electronics here are much stricter…Thanks!
It’s quite a complex situation at present – you’re right that the EU has a much more uniform requirement for takeback and recycling than the US, where this is being enacted on a state by state basis. However studies of the actual disposition of much of the waste collected under the EU’s WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) programs show that a distressingly high proportion of them are being diverted and dumped in the developing world. So the regulations are a start but need more enforcement and surveillance
In the US 23+ states and cities have instituted e-waste programs focused on manufacturer takeback and disposal bans – a promising start. The number changes frequently – you can check current requirements at http://www.electronicsrecycling.org/Public/default.
Dear Sarah,
I fancy the idea of journalists bringing people together.
I am one of the owners of United Pepper and we are very much interested in the EPEAT tool. You are doing some ground breaking work as far as we are concerned. We would love to know more about your organization and see how it can help to fulfill our quest for green and fairtrade electronics manufacturing.
We are very interested in your efforts as well – EPEAT is meant to enable companies like yours to obtain recognition and market advantage for your efforts to produce environmentally responsible products.
Purchasers in the EU are increasingly using EPEAT to identify ‘greener’ options when selecting IT equipment – I’ve just finished our annual Environmental Benefits report and was pleased to find for example that 2.9 million EPEAT-registered products were purchased in France last year, and over 400,000 in Belgium (along with 2.6 million in Germany, 2.8 million in the UK) You can see the report at http://www.epeat.net/docs/EPEATEBReport2009.pdf
You can find my contact information on the epeat.net website as well. I look forward to speaking with you.
Hi Sarah,
This is Rhitu Chatterjee, science reporter with The World.
It looks like your certification and rating has clearly made an impact. But I’m curious—-what are some of the environmental and social hazards of this industry that you think aren’t addressed by EPEAT?
In other words, if you had a chance to revise the EPEAT standards what would you change to have a stronger impact?
Thanks for taking the time to be in this Forum.
Rhitu
One area that is often mentioned is the significant issues around workplace practices in the electronics sector. The essence of EPEAT is that stakeholders -environmental advocates, manufacturers, purchasers, researchers, recyclers- set the agenda. So inclusion of these issues will depend on stakeholder consensus.
The challenge is to create standards that can be uniformly applied and adequately measured, as well as reducing purchasers’ impact.
Currently EPEAT focuses on product characteristics which can be tested/ assessed. Ratings based on workplace policies and pledges are very challenging to verify because conditions, and suppliers change constantly. We encourage purchasers to use EPEAT to address environmental aspects and then if they wish, to add social criteria.
Cell phones! The service providers want you to constantly upgrade so they can extend your service contract another two years, often with the data services the fancy new smart-phone requires.
What’s the best way to be a green cell phone user? How do you convince the carriers to change their marketing practices and reward customers for being green?
Thanks.
You point out a very important point that is (to a greater or leser extent) true of the entire electronics marketplace – the practice of constantly disposing of (working) technology to replace it with the newest, more powerful or more “cool” gadget.
Consumer pushback can help shift to a more sustainable market – by requesting products that can be upgraded, by holding onto products (as long as they are energy efficient) for longer useful life. EPEAT addresses this by rewarding manufacturers for providing longer warranties, longer availability of spare parts, upgradeable products, etc. But consumers need to ask for (and pay for) these sorts of design and service changes for manufacturers to really engage.
EPEAT is scheduled to extend to cover cell phones in the next few years.
Hello Sarah,
Every day I hear more and more green claims from corporations. How can we trust them to actually do what they say? Wouldn’t regulation be more effective in reducing environmental impact?
Thank-you.
It’s very important to sort out credible statements about company and product performance from unsubtantiated claims – and challenging for consumers to do so!
Certifications can help – look for systems that are open with what they measure,are independent from the companies they certify, are not entirely dependent on fees per product listed (which can encourage keeping products listed even where there are issues), perform regular investigations of company claims and openly disclose any issues they find.
Regulation is a very helpful tool for setting a baseline on product safety or environmental protection, but is not well suited for pushing innovation and continuous improvement. Certification systems enable consumers to encourage and reward innovation above and beyond requirements
Dear Sarah, I applaud your demonstrated efforts throug EPEAT to impact industries world-wide, and also to make EPEAT accessible to liberal arts types like me. Given my bent, I am curious to hear more about how EPEAT can take human rights issues into account, or what stands in the way of developing human rights-based standards. I think that the human rights issue could serve as another hook for the average jane to get excited about EPEAT, in addition to general concerns about the environment. Thanks, and regards.
Submitted on 2010/09/28 at 1:29pm
It’s a great question – and a challenging area to impact effectively. Development of uniform international standards for baseline acceptable working conditions is still an area of heated debate. And additional barriers to transparency and effective controls remain: the constantly changing supply chain, the number of extremely small suppliers involved in production, and the difficulty of verifying specific conditions – e.g. what appears to be the case in a worksite audit one day may not be true the next day. The Electronics Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) – an attempt at addressing this arena – has struggled with these.
EPEAT Stakeholders have discussed requiring compliance with particular worker safety specifications, but the issues above must be address
Hi again – just to add to my statement, there are some useful standards for workplace health and safety that are being increasingly applied worldwide – such as the OHSAS 18001 standard (see http://www.ohsas-18001-occupational-health-and-safety.com/who.htm ), which has also been used to specifically address the electronics supply chain.
For business purchasers it may work best to require EPEAT and then such a standalone worker safety standard – for consumers it is a bit harder to get to this level of detail at point of purchase – but you can certainly ask stores and manufacturers’ customer service departments about worker protections.
Hi Sarah,
Any comment on the big box stores, best buy and walmart’s recycling efforts–they seem to adhere to strict standards–http://www.bestbuy.com/site/null/null/pcmcat174700050010.c?id=pcmcat174700050010y thanks for all the good work.
These sorts of recycling programs are laudable – and in many cases (such as the program you cite) appear to be well designed to require best practices. With any program managed in-house,though, verification may vary in quality, or the program may change in future, and consumers may not be able to quickly or easily grasp the nuances of such issues wihtout in depth research. A certification – such as an R2 or e-Stewards recycling certification (mentioned above) can ensure that no matter who the provider is, best practices are followed.
It’s also really important to redesign products so they last longer and are easier to recycle – if products are disposed of every few years, and if they are hard to reuse and recycle, even the best recycling practices will fail to protect the environment.
How about those power strips designed to cut off “phantom power” used by electronics even when turned “off?” Most of these are quite expensive, so I don’t think they make sense economically — they will never save enough cost of electricity to pay for themselves. So the reason to get one is the “save the planet.” But I wonder how “green” they are in terms of total carbon footprint to make them, etc.
Great question Mike – those power strips can be useful if you have a lot of different gadgets plugged in – especially items like cell phone chargers, that are unused more than they are used.
A more economical solution, is to use a regular power strip for all plugs that are only intermittently used (camera and cellphone chargers, computer power supplies) and turn it off at night or when you’re away from home. This relies on your remembering to turn off the strip!
Apart from some metal and plastic, plus electrical cable the smart strips must contain electronics to assess power usage. So they may contain small amounts of heavy metals, PVC and other problematic materials. This is unlikely to have much impact because the product is used for years before disposal, unlike other electronics
Thanks so much to all for your interesting comments and queries! I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.
I’ll close with cne request – please make sure to communicate your interest in greener products to electronics retailers and manufacturers when you interact with them as consumers – and of course vote for those options with your purchasing dollars.
The electronics industry is built on rapid innovation – when consumer interest in ‘green’ is clear, the power of that innovation can be harnessed to develop products that are less toxic, easier to recycle, more efficient, last longer and are better managed at end of life.
But if retailers and manufacturers don’t hear from you, they will hesitate – on the assumption you don’t want such products. So speak up!
Thanks again – Sarah
hello sarah,
i am doing a school project on acid rain and i was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me
question 1:
if you were a consultant of the australian government what would you say???
question 2:
how do countries affected by acid rain manage it???
thank you that is all
Sarah