Major vendors including Hewlett-Packard,
Dell and Sony
are working together to push through a legislative mandate in the U.S. that
will make it easier for users to recycle their consumer electronics.

The mandate calls for companies to cut consumer electronics recycling costs
and to make their reuse and recycling the highest priority when manufacturing
products, panelists said during a talk at the International
Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas.

The cost to consumers of recycling products, including things like collection
fees, is high, the panelists said, and some manufacturers have taken advantage
of weak recycling laws to manufacture products that cannot be effectively recycled
or reused.

Some companies have standards in place to manufacture products that are easy
to recycle, but others hope to drive down their own costs by adopting lower
production standards, the panelists said.

A legislative mandate would create a level playing field for manufacturers,
said Tod Arbogast, director of sustainable business at Dell. A common approach
to designing for recycling will promote the production of products that can
be recycled and drive down manufacturing costs through effective product design
and distribution.

As an example of what can be done, Sony's new OLED (organic light-emitting
diode) TV is designed to be disassembled by common household tools, said Douglas
Smith, Sony's director of corporate environmental affairs. It is a step toward
making products that can be easily recycled, he said.

To be effective, recycling processes will be needed to convert used components
back to original raw material for other products, followed by reuse or resale.
Production costs can be cut through recycling and reusing materials rather than
extracting and processing raw materials, said Dell's Arbogast.

"There are significant economic benefits in doing so as well as significant
environmental benefits, which I think are often forgotten," Arbogast said.

HP is adopting standards to recycle printers with plastic that doesn't convert
to raw material, said Renee St. Denis, director of recycling at HP. The end-of-life
resale value of printers after seven to 10 years of usage is minimal, but the
high cost of plastics versus other printer components has made the company come
up with innovative reuses of those plastics, she said.

Dell already follows a Texas state law that requires PC manufacturers to dispose
of products as easily as they are placed in the market, Arbogast said. The company
accepts used Dell PCs for free via mail, Arbogast said.

Sony is taking full responsibility for the products its manufactures -- cell
phones, TVs and other devices -- by offering the ability to recycle them at
no cost, Smith said.

In March, Sony will launch a program in the U.S. where consumers can recycle
consumer electronics for free by dropping them off at locations within a 20-mile
radius of any SonyStyle store. Though the company has only 55 SonyStyle stores
in the U.S. , the company hopes to expand the effort by involving its distributors
and other companies.

Sony takes full responsibility for products it manufactures and has already
recycled a giant TV screen belonging to the city of Tampa Bay for free, and
the company wants to deliver the same recycling ability to users, said Smith.

IDG News Service

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