Major CE Makers to Break Ranks With CEA on NYC E-Waste Suit, Greenpeace Says
Greenpeace expects several major CE companies soon to publicly repudiate CEA’s lawsuit to block New York City’s e- waste law, the green group’s leading CE campaigner told a CES news conference Thursday where Greenpeace released its 14th Guide to Greener Electronics. “Stay tuned” for the names of CEA members that will break ranks with the trade group, said Greenpeace’s Casey Harrell, who wouldn’t identify the companies. “Some brands are telling us one thing and potentially doing another, explicitly with respect” to supporting the e-waste suit, Harrell told us.
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Parker Brugge, CEA’s vice president of environmental affairs and industry sustainability, said in an e-mail that the industry is solidly behind the lawsuit: “Maybe Casey should be pressed to provide more details, because I doubt he can provide anything concrete.”
On a question from Brugge in the audience, whether Greenpeace would weigh awarding bonus points in its Guide to Greener Electronics to companies that supported national e- waste legislation, as CEA does, Harrell said that was unlikely. The way the guide is “structured,” Greenpeace more likely would award points to companies that supported “voluntary takeback,” he said. Still, Greenpeace supports a national law and “there’s a significant need for the OEMs to get behind a national law,” Harrell said. However, “our allied groups that work with us in the United States have not given me an indication there’s political expediency” for a national e-waste law “in the short term,” Harrell said. “From my perspective, I now see national e-waste laws passing in the next Congress.”
In the three years since Greenpeace began publishing its Guide, the rankings have spurred the CE to make “significant progress” improving its environmental record, Harrell told the news conference. As one example, Harrell cited the dissolution two to three years ago of the Electronic Manufacturers Coalition for Responsible Recycling, which advocated fee-based e-waste recycling that would have taken producers “totally out of the loop.” In Q-and-A, we asked Harrell if he was crediting Greenpeace with the coalition’s dissolution, and he responded, “yes,” then added that other groups and “macro” conditions may also have had a role.
In the latest Guide, Apple, Nokia and Sony Ericsson scored highest for introducing products free of polyvinyl chlorides and brominated flame retardants, while Samsung dropped “dramatically” to seventh from second place (among 18 companies) for failing to eliminate BFRs from all its products by this month, Greenpeace said. “With only its latest models of mobile phones free of toxic substances,” Samsung has set next January “as the deadline for eliminating them from new models of its notebooks and still has no definitive timeline for removing them from its TVs and household appliances,” Greenpeace said.