Two controversial European Union (EU) directives calling for extended producer responsibility in the electrical and electronic appliance arena are likely to have a dramatic impact on U.S. companies. EU officials are expected to sign the legislation into law in January.

Under the new rules, manufacturers will be required by 2007 to take back equipment that has reached the end of its useful life and reuse or recycle between 50 and 75% of the parts, depending on the type of appliance. Moreover, the EU will ban the use of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and the brominated flame retardants polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) from these products by July 2006. Exemptions are likely for applications for which there is no technical replacement available, but that will be decided on a case-by-case basis, according to the EU.

Because all companies doing business in Europe will have to comply with these new design requirements, U.S. environmentalists say wholesale changes in manufacturing processes are also likely in the United States, where the electronics industry has been loathe to adopt end-of-life product stewardship programs.

Jennifer Guhl, director of international trade policy for the American Electronics Association, admits as much. “The U.S. high-tech industry exported $50 billion in goods to the EU in 2000, and every one of those products will be captured under the scope of this directive,” she says, adding that “it’s unlikely that companies will produce lead-free products and market them only in the EU.”

The United States could still challenge the legislation before the World Trade Organization as it has threatened to do in the past (Environ. Sci. Technol. 1999, 33, 228A–229A), but such a challenge would face an uphill fight, says Bette Fishbein, a senior fellow at Inform, a nonprofit research organization. “The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has looked at the trade implications of extended producer responsibility programs and didn’t find them to adversely affect trade or to be discriminatory because they apply to everyone in the same way,” she notes.

Besides, Japanese companies are already way ahead of the curve in terms of complying with the EU rules, says Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a grassroots environmental group. “A number of those companies already produce lead-free and halogen-free products,” he says. Moreover, as e-waste take-back schemes are implemented in Europe, Smith predicts that pressure will grow for companies to do the same in the United States. —KRIS CHRISTEN