Reducing the global impact of e-waste
Radio-frequency identification tags could help resellers, dismantlers, and recyclers identify whether junked electronics products are worth saving.
Recent ES&T research documenting that informal recycling operations in China produced the highest levels of brominated dioxins ever recorded is but a small piece of the growing body of evidence that unsound recycling of computers has global ramifications. A new program at Arizona State University (ASU) aims to develop new technologies to reduce the environmental impact of computers at the ends of their lives. The initiative is the first of its kind in the U.S. and among the first in the world.
One of the program's key scientists is Eric Williams, who holds joint appointments at ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability and its civil and environmental engineering department. He is the author of groundbreaking articles assessing the life-cycle impacts of computer chips and entire computers, which require disproportionately large amounts of materials and energy in their manufacturing, use, and recycling.
"The manufacturing phase takes up the lion's share of the resources used during the life cycle of computing equipment, so extending the lifetime of computers and other information technology equipment becomes an important environmental service," Williams explains. He estimates that computers are replaced approximately every 3 years in developed nations like Japan and the U.S., well before the functional life span of the machine is over. "What people get rid of is a mix of usable machines, components, and junk. But in many recycling systems around the world (including Japan's), this is ignored and everything gets recycled for materials," he says.
Williams and his colleagues are developing a technology that uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to provide information about the condition and composition of computer systems and other electronics products. These tags, which are widely used in retail and cost as little as 10–20¢ each, could help resellers, dismantlers, and recyclers identify what can be reused—from the entire product to parts or materials, Williams says.
"RFID is a key technology which supports safe and efficient recycling in the future [throughout the world]," attests Mitsutaka Matsumoto of the Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing Group of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), another organization at the forefront of developing technology to improve electronics recycling. RFID systems could provide valuable information on the usefulness of electronic items, agrees Amit Jain, the managing director of IRG Systems South Asia Private, Ltd., who has studied the impact of informal recycling in Delhi, India. This information could help increase the life span of computers and other electronics, he says.
Williams argues that RFID can complement the successful efforts of environmental groups such as the Basel Action Network (BAN), Greenpeace, and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition to shame electronics manufacturers into improving their environmental performance. By all accounts, computer manufacturers have come a long way since BAN's Exporting Harm report (PDF: 1.5MB) was first released in 2002. Manufacturers are now competing to be viewed as green, and they want to remove as many chemicals perceived as being toxic from their products as possible, says Scott O'Connell, the environmental program manager for Dell computers.
To Williams, this suggests that computer manufacturers would be willing to pay the extra cost associated with installing RFID devices on their computers and perhaps even on the individual subcomponents.
Representatives from three U.S. electronics recycling companies interviewed for this story agreed that RFID would indeed help them identify saleable subcomponents and could increase reuse of such parts. Currently, many recyclers maintain databases of information about valuable subcomponents, but harvesting pertinent information (such as the make and model numbers) can be very time-consuming, say Andrew McManus, environmental manager of Metech International, and David Zimet, president of Hesstech. "It would be great if the tags could somehow be used to provide accountability that would show manufacturers that their products were recycled in accordance with their wishes," in other words, not sold to the lowest bidder to be shipped to whatever port will accept them adds Lauren Roman of MaSeR Corp. The U.S. EPA has rules governing the export of used cathode ray tubes, but recyclers say they are not widely enforced.
Not everyone agrees that the technology would be effective outside the developed world. The cost of RFID reading devices could be prohibitive in poorer countries, point out Ted Smith, chair of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, and Jim Puckett of BAN. Williams counters that electronics manufacturers' desire to prove that they are being good corporate citizens may give them an incentive to pay for the cost of such technologies.
