Now Europe is following the Dutch lead and taking the green movement to the manufacturers of white goods and electronics. A spate of legislation emerging from Brussels aims ultimately to hold manufacturers responsible for the fate of their products long after they’ve left store shelves or car showrooms. They’re being told they must ensure that as much as 85 percent of their products is recycled or reused, and the remainder disposed of in environmentally sound ways. As in the Netherlands, that may call for byzantine collection arrangements to funnel goods to the recyclers. “The EU is really leading the world,” says Mark Strutt of Greenpeace. “The politicians want to break the link between waste and economic growth.”
Something surely needs to be done. In recent decades consumers have grown used to an ever-speedier turnover of hardware. A computer built in the 1960s lasted 10 years on average; now they are scrapped in just four. Europe’s junk heap of electronic goods now weighs 6 million tons and will double in 12 years. In the past more than 90 percent of this detritus had been buried in landfills, burned in incinerators or abandoned by the side of the road. The same went for the 15 million cars junked in Europe each year. “This is a major problem for Europe,” says Graeme Maxton of the motor-industry consultancy Autopolis. “America has vast areas of land to dump its cars. Europe hasn’t.” All this waste is taking an obvious toll on the planet. Environmentalists aren’t alone in fretting over a list of noxious elements–notably lead, mercury and cadmium–that may be finding their way into the air, soil and water. Says Garel Rhys, a motor-industry economist at Cardiff University: “Manufacturers just have to accept that this is what society wants.”
Even at this early stage in Europe’s recycling experiment, though, the new laws have already caused unintended problems. Some European countries have been caught wholly unprepared. Because of the new regulations, waste sites and incinerators throughout Europe are being inundated with hardware. Britain got in trouble earlier this year when it had no plant capable of stripping out the ozone-depleting CFC foam from old fridges, as required by law. A stockpile of 900,000 machines–what’s been dubbed a refrigerator mountain–sits in rented warehouses awaiting destruction. Recycling facilities now coming online face a backlog of six months. Down the road, countries such as Greece and Spain may get caught without sufficient shredding plants for cars. Another problem: replacing bad but essential materials. The EU will soon ban the use of lead, a hazardous substance that’s been used for decades to solder circuit boards. Electronics companies are struggling to find alternatives. “This could be a much bigger challenge for us [than the waste-disposal regulations],” says Michelle O’Neill, a Hewlett-Packard lobbyist in Brussels.
Business leaders also warn of excessive costs. “Society and the politicians have another objective here: to move costs onto industry,” says Viktor Sundberg, European- affairs director of Swedish manufacturer Electrolux. Inevitably some of those costs will trickle down to the consumer. The EU reckons that for electrical goods the annual recycling bill could reach 900 million euros, about 1 percent of the purchase price for electronic goods. That’s far too low, by some reckonings. Sony puts the price tag for recycling its European electrical goods sold just in 2000 at 200 million euros. “For an inexpensive item like a television set you could be talk-ing about the whole profit margin,” says Townsend Feehan of the European Information and Communications Technology Association, a trade group in Brussels. And there’s the sticky problem of assigning responsibility. Is one manufacturer liable for recycling the products of a former rival that has gone out of business? Should carmakers pay for dismembering vehicles built years before the directive took effect? Europe hasn’t yet worked out these issues.
The new recycling laws may not cost as much as one might think. Many of the new targets are only incrementally tougher than existing ones. Carmarkers, for instance, will in five years have to recycle or reuse 80 percent, by weight, of their old cars. But in the more ecoconscious northern states, they already voluntarily recycle 60 percent.
That may be why manufacturers have greeted the new rules meekly. Carmakers, for one, have been anticipating the changes. Ford claims that its latest Fiesta hatchback, newly built for the European market, is already 85 percent recyclable. Half the 100 kilos of plastic that go into every Fiesta can be ripped out in 30 minutes: the fender comes away in just 45 seconds. That’s a powerful image for the new ecofriendly manufacturing, provided Europe’s medicine works without too many side effects.
