How do you make electronics easier to recycle?

Mountains of outdated electronics are rising worldwide, and a United Nations-led initiative launched in Bonn, Germany Wednesday is trying to set standards on how to recycle it.

Known as "e-scrap" or "e-waste," discarded electronics are one of the fastest-growing segments of municipal garbage, piling up three times faster than other refuse. Some of this waste is dumped in landfills, where the toxic substances it contains may leach into groundwater. But 80 percent ends up in developing countries where labor is cheap enough to make the harvesting of materials profitable. There, crude extraction methods and an absence of regulations expose workers to a host of toxic substances.

The UN initiative, called Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP), includes industry, environmental, academic, and government groups. Discussions revolve around how to make electronics easier to recycle.

Modern electronics are so complex that they don't lend themselves to speedy disassembly. That means more labor, more labor means higher costs, and high costs make e-scrap recycling less attractive.

If products could be designed for easy dismantling, recycling would be profitable not only in poor countries, but in the United States and European Union nations as well.

One way to bring this about, experts say, is to hold firms responsible for their products from the beginning to the end of their life spans. Some companies, including Xerox, HP, and Dell, have proactively established recycling programs for their outdated products. Legislation mandating e-waste recycling is already in place in the EU and in four US states.

But as growing demand causes prices of various materials in today's electronics to skyrocket, some argue that recycling is profitable now and necessary in order to keep rare materials in circulation.

"There is this urgent demand," says Ruediger Kuehr, executive secretary of the StEP Initiative, "to establish better technologies in order to harvest valuable resources and to train people in developing countries" where much of today's e-scrap goes for reprocessing.

The accelerating pace of technological innovation itself is fueling the growth of e-waste. Early personal computers lasted an average of five years; now they become outdated in about two. According to a US government report, Americans "retire" 130 million cellphones yearly, after typically using them for 1-1/2 years.

The UN expects the amount of e-waste generated worldwide every year to soon reach 40 million tons, enough to fill a line of garbage trucks stretching halfway around the world.

Consumer electronics contain many potentially toxic substances, from lead and mercury to flame retardants and PCBs. The EPA estimates that e-waste accounts for only 1 to 4 percent of municipal waste. But according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, it's responsible for 70 percent of the heavy metals in landfills, including 40 percent of all lead. (Cathode-ray tubes found in old televisions and computer monitors contain four to eight pounds of lead.)

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