EPA TO FUND NEPSI BEYOND ORIGINAL TIMELINE

NEPSI timeline envisaged 6 meetings among stakeholders between June 2001 and Sept. 2002 to facilitate agreement on national system for collection and recycling of growing pile of electronics waste (e-waste). With no agreement in sight, Sept. meeting of full NEPSI group that had 45 stakeholders at table was put off to enable smaller group to attempt to reach compromise on most contentious issue of front-end financing system. “The EPA is committed to working with this group as long as it seems fruitful to do so. We are not at all bound to a one-year time frame,” Lindsay said: “It was really the other stakeholders who insisted on that [time-frame].” She declined to say who wanted deadline.

Lindsay gave far different assessment of progress made by NEPSI than do state and local govt. representatives. “I think we are making progress,” she said: “I think it is slower than we had originally hoped for.” She said she knew from experience that such processes take long time and that “one year was not enough to get to where we needed to be… I think we should give the process enough time.” She said tone of conversations and effort put into NEPSI process “indicates that people are serious about this on all sides. And so it’s worth the time and effort.” All stakeholders appeared to think that “we are making useful progress,” Lindsay said, and are inclined to keep going. If they felt NEPSI wasn’t making any progress, they wouldn’t be wasting any more time on it, she said.

As for EPA’s role in process, Lindsay said agency had brought together states that had tried to deal with e-waste but hadn’t gone too far in their efforts, and industry, which agency felt was “very interested in finding an uniform response to this problem nationwide rather than multiple different state approaches.” Agency also knew that even states felt national approach would be more effective. “What we've been doing is basically funding the dialog, facilitating it and participating in the dialog,” she said: “But we are not taking positions in the dialog -- mostly we see our role as just being capable of bringing these people together to encourage them to come to some sort of consensus if it’s possible.” Lindsay said she knew that “lots of people are getting impatient with these things but they take time and patience and by the process of having these dialogs you may not think that much is happening but people are learning about what the folks on the other side of the table think about a problem and what they think works and doesn’t work.” And that will be helpful in leading ultimately to agreement, Lindsay said: “I can’t say for certain that the dialog will result in a recommendation about what a national program should look like, but I am very optimist that we can.” One-year time-frame was “very aggressive,” she said, “but I think there is value to setting an aggressive schedule because that keeps people focused on [the issue] and makes sure that they aren’t wasting time.”

Lindsay said full NESPI working group this summer had delegated to smaller subgroup, of which she was part, task of seeing whether it was worthwhile to have final meeting in Sept. as originally scheduled. “And we decided it wasn’t timely to have the meeting in September,” she said. Subgroup is trying to develop either one recommendation or several that it can take to larger group. “Right now we have not got the next large or full group meeting scheduled. The small group is going to meet again in November with the hope of narrowing things down to a couple of really good models… that would then justify us suggesting to the larger group that they reconvene.”

As for what she perceived as major sticking points that had made agreement elusive, Lindsay listed 3 issues: (1) Disagreement on model for financing collection and recycling. Govts. preferred to have recycling fee upfront at time products are sold rather than at point of disposal, she said. But industry favored point of disposal fee as way to finance system. “So there has been a lot of back and forth on this issue. At this point, we are now addressing upfront financing mechanisms only.” (2) What costs national financing scheme should cover. Should it cover all costs, or just portion? And what should be relative responsibilities of industry and consumer, vs. govts.? (3) Time frame -- how quickly national system could be put in place. Can it be done voluntarily or does it have to done with legislation? “You have to allow a fair amount of time for that legislation to be put in place,” she said, and determination has to be made about what can be done voluntarily vs. what has to be mandated.

Another related issue, Lindsay said, was free riders. What needs to be about companies that aren’t at table that may or may not be interested in doing what NEPSI group agrees to do. There has been much discussion of how to get large section of industry to participate in solution voluntarily. Question whether participation will have to be mandated to ensure compliance also was debated, she said, to ensure that participating companies aren’t put at competitive disadvantage while their rivals are free-riding. One issue where there’s more consensus, Lindsay said, is on need for environmentally safe recycling of e-waste. “It’s generally understood that the wholesale export of these products to lesser developed countries for recycling there is not a preferred solution and that they need to be processed in this country.”

Lindsay was sympathetic to industry concerns about antitrust issues arising from front-end financing system. “If the upfront financing mechanism is basically a form of creating a fee which would then be charged uniformly to retailers and then to consumers -- that could be viewed as price fixing.” It could be problem if industry weren’t protected from antitrust liability and authorized to charge fee for environmental reasons, she said: “So the antitrust concerns are real, if there is an agreed-upon fee that the industry wants to charge down the product chain all the way to the consumer.” EPA isn’t proposing any legislative fix for antitrust issues, she said: “It is possible, although not certain, that if this [front-end fees] were addressed in legislation, the legislation could cover the antitrust issues. But the EPA is not promoting any particular outcome in this dialog.” If recommendation for legislation were to emerge from NEPSI process, EPA would have to consider it carefully and take that to higher in Bush Administration for decision. “This is a delicate issue, the whole issue of legislation,” Lindsay said.

There also is issue of fairness, she said. Companies at NEPSI dialog and those that aren’t part of process have different positions on historic waste, she said. Some companies that are major market leaders today weren’t so in past, “and they are less inclined to take on responsibility for other companies’ old products.” Companies’ names that are on many older products often are not key market players today and so for them to take responsibility for their old products, or even a portion of those costs, would be very difficult for them, she said, because they didn’t have current sales to cover those costs: “It’s a fairness issue for those who dominate the market today and those who dominated the market in the past.”