CEA Says It Has Concerns About New York State E-Waste Bill
It’s not necessarily so, as a Natural Resource Defense Council blogger recently suggested, that the e-waste bill that just cleared the New York State Senate has “broad industry support,” CEA spokeswoman Jen Bemisderfer told us Tuesday.
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"We're encouraged to see New York State focused on this important issue,” Bemisderfer said. “As an industry, we prefer a state approach to electronics recycling over a city approach. However, any electronics recycling legislation needs to be reasonable and share responsibility among various stakeholders. We have concerns that the current bill doesn’t meet those standards, but we're working with New York legislators to make changes to ensure that the legislation is appropriate and effective."
In a recent blog, NRDC Senior Attorney Kate Sinding wrote that unlike the New York City e-waste law that CE and IT makers are suing to block, the state bill “actually enjoys broad industry support.” That’s because it “does not contain the controversial provision in the New York City regulations that precipitated the industry suit,” Sinding said. That’s a reference to city rules requiring manufacturers to collect unwanted e-waste directly from residents’ homes.
The state bill has no direct-collection requirement, but the city law never had any such provision, either. The city’s Sanitation Department wrote the direct collection rule into the books, having defined the law’s “convenient collection” requirement as collecting e-waste directly from residents’ home because so few New Yorkers own cars.
Wording in the state bill is very similar to requirements in most e-waste laws around the country that collections be “convenient.” For example, the state measure would make producers responsible for collecting e-waste “free of cost and in a manner convenient to consumers."
It gives examples of several “acceptance methods” that “shall be considered reasonably convenient.” They include mail or “ship back return” programs; collection events conducted by the manufacturer “or the manufacturer’s agent or designee, including events conducted through local governments or private parties”; fixed “acceptance locations” or “dedicated” dropoff sites; agreements with local governments, retail stores, sales outlets and not-for-profit organizations that “have agreed to provide facilities for the collection of electronic waste”; community collection events; and “any combination of these or other acceptance methods which effectively provide for the acceptance of electronic waste for recycling or reuse through means that are available and reasonably convenient to consumers in the state."
"At a minimum,” the state bill says, manufacturers “shall ensure” that all counties and municipalities in the state with populations of 10,000 or more have access to “at least one method of acceptance.” But it also gives the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation the authority to “establish additional requirements to ensure convenient collection from consumers.” Similar language in the city law gave the Sanitation Department power to write the rule on direct collections.