E-Waste: Can the Nation Handle Modern Refuse in the Digital Age?

Opening Statement By Chairman Bart Gordon

Good morning and welcome to today’s hearing on electronic equipment waste (e-waste) in the United States.

I would like to welcome our panelists who will share with us their views on the end of life management of the electronics that we all use and enjoy every day.

This nation started on the path that brings us here today in the 1940s when we began producing and buying televisions.  By 1960, about 60 million American homes had TV sets.  By last year, we were over 250 million.

In the 1980's we began to acquire home computers and businesses, universities and schools invested in personal computers.  Between 1986 and 1990, around 28 million personal computers were sold in the U.S.  By 2000, that number had more than doubled.

We all own and use these electronic products – TVs, computers, cell phones, MP3 and DVD players – but we rarely stop to think about what happens to all these products once we are finished with them.

Today the amount we have to dispose of is in the billions.  We know that many of these products end up in our landfills or are sitting in our attics and storage closets because we aren’t exactly sure what to do with them.

Innovation in the electronics industry has produced staggering advances and I don't think anybody would want to turn the clock back on that progress.  But if we could turn the clock back on something, we would want to ask the engineers who began using lead in televisions to shield viewers from x-rays and ask, "Can we come up with something better here?"  Because now in 2008, with the transition to digital TV signals fast approaching and better technology on the market, we have millions of TVs and monitors with untold tons of lead, headed to landfills.  And these old products also contain other toxins like mercury and cadmium.

Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of recycling and going green.  As we will hear today, e-waste is not just trash.  These products contain precious metals like gold and copper, and it doesn't make sense to put gold in a dump.

Over a dozen states now have legislation mandating proper e-waste disposal and many electronics producers now offer take-back services.

However, it’s estimated that only about 10 to 15 percent of these products reach recyclers.  Clearly much needs to be done to educate consumers about recycling and make sure everybody has access to recycling.

But raising awareness is not the only thing that can be done to tackle our growing pile of e-waste.  Today we will also hear about opportunities to design products to avoid end-of-life problems and make product recycling more efficient and economically attractive.  We must seriously look at the issue of re-use and help find ways to safeguard against its downstream problems.  We must also develop methods to adequately assess the economic and environmental impacts of e-waste and policies to manage it.

This is a problem of global proportions.  Technology and innovation have as much a role to play in solving it as they did in its creation.

We don’t want to stifle the innovation that has put the computing power of a room-sized mainframe into the palm of our hand, but we want to go forward with enough information and foresight to ensure that these modern marvels are not a modern environmental problem.

Witnesses

Panel

2 - Mr. Gerardo Castro
Director of Contracts and Environmental Services Goodwill Industries Goodwill Industries
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3 - Ms. Renee St. Denis
Director, Product Take-Back and Recycling Hewlett-Packard Hewlett-Packard
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4 - Mr. Eric Harris
Director, Government Relations The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries
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5 - Mr. Ted Smith
Chair Electronics Take←Back Coalition Electronics Take←Back Coalition
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1 - Dr. Eric Williams
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & the School for Sustainability Arizona State University Arizona State University
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6 - Mr. Michael Williams
Executive Vice President and General Counsel Sony Electronics Inc. Sony Electronics Inc.
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