OAKLAND, Calif. — The continual pendulum of e-waste news swung both back and forth this week as yet another company released an e-waste take-back plan, and although the federal government announced recycling standards for electronics, they fell on deaf ears in the e-waste and enviro community.
Good news first:
Lenovo announced this week that it was expanding its Green IT program to Europe. The program was launched in the U.S. this summer, and preceded by a few months Lenovo's
joining the Climate Group.
In Europe, the company's Asset Recovery Service will give companies the option of returning their hardware to Lenovo after three years, generally getting 10 to 15 percent of the original purchase value of the machines in return. Lenovo will take back the computers, securely wipe their hard drives, and then try to refurbish and resell, or else recycle and upcycle, the computers for other uses.
Meanwhile, the EPA on Friday
released its Responsible Recycling guidelines for electronics. The R2 guide gives electronics recyclers 13 principles to make sure that e-waste is handled in compliance with U.S. laws and foreign countries' regulations.
Unfortunately, the R2 guidelines have been a source of contention amongst manufacturers, recyclers and NGOs for some time. At the beginning of October, two of the leading e-waste groups
pulled out of the R2 discussions because they saw the guidelines as missing the largest issue facing e-waste recyclers.
"The current R2 standards won't actually change the problems that the GAO report outlined, because R2 doesn't require certified recyclers to prove that their e-waste isn't exported to these countries without their permission," Barbara Kyle, the national coordinator for the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, told GreenerComputing back in October. "What's the point of having a 'responsible recycling' standard if you don't deal with the biggest problem plaguing this industry?"
Kyle went into great depth on some of the issues facing the world of e-waste takeback in a
GreenBiz Radio podcast two weeks ago; and as the news this past week shows, there is still progress happening on electronic waste, but it is coming in fits and starts.
