The first decision maker is the consumer who has a dead piece of electronics. There is simply not enough precious metal in the unit for it to be financially worthwhile to recycle themselves, through e-scrap is certainly valuable. They can decide to throw it in their bin, take it to the nearby waste facility, or take it to an e-waste recycler.
I don't know the proportions, but I think most will take it to a recycler if it is convenient. This is because they remember what it was worth (once), and so psychologically the material has sufficient emotional value to invest the time. This is pretty unique to e-waste.
By and large, most waste facilities do not charge the public for e-waste recycling. This seems to be because they believe that e-waste recycling needs to be free for it to happen. I tend to disagree, and think people making the effort to drive to the waste facility suggests that they would be prepared to pay a small fee.
The next decision point is the waste facility. Let's say that e-waste is collected separately. The operator then has to decide what to do with it. Landfilling e-waste in Perth costs $100/tonne. Recycling it costs $650/tonne. So the natural decision is to take the e-waste to landfill. Unless there is another driver, which there often is.
Once in the landfill, the costs to reverse the decision are higher again, perhaps a further $1,000/tonne to recover the e-waste from the landfill before it is then recycled at $650/tonne. These costs might differ a little if the precious metals were recovered from incinerator ash through some sort of metallurgical extraction process. I don't know.
Each of these drivers could be reversed at each decision point.
The consumer could receive some sort of incentive to recycle the e-waste. Most thinking seems to be around "product stewardship" driven by government. As evidenced by the Australian approach, this requires all sorts of laws and rules. Hopefully it will work. Other approaches might be a trade-in, or even some sort of gamification where consumers get non-financial rewards for behaviour that incurs some small cost (financial and inconvenience).
The facility operator could remove the cost problem by charging for e-waste. How much might such a charge be? For a 5kg computer, the $650/tonne recycling charge is just $3.25 per computer (or an additional $2.75 about the landfill charge). A laptop might be $2.00. Charged transparently and with an assurance that the material is being recycled, most consumers could bear this.
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| E-scrap - motherboards from Everything Scrap Metal |
Or there might even be a new business model to achieving this. Maybe an entrepreneur could gather credits from sponsors that can be provided to consumers for each kg of e-waste delivered (or type, printers vs laptops vs desktops). The sponsors get highly targeted, low cost promotion to people who have self-identified as upgrading their computers and, at that point in time, are thinking about their computer and the environment. The entrepreneur has the costs of recycling covered. The consumer gets the credit plus the good feeling around recycling.
Just one potential business model among what are sure to be many. The point is, we don't have to chalk the current failure up to an inevitable consequence of marginal thinking. It can be turned around with thought and a good business model.
The concept of marginal thinking.
ReplyDeletePeople by nature are marginal thinkers, we don’t know everything, and we prefer to operate in a comfort zone of what we know, from how we live, who we socialise with and what we do. There is a German buzz work that I love which is Weltanschauung, which is World view, or more importantly an individual philosophy of life through which we interpret the world.
For me, seeing a man walking a dog down the street invokes no significant reaction, for my two year old daughter it is a terrifying experience that she has nightmares of for days following (She is terrified of being licked). That presents two very different interpretations of the world. As she gets older, she will hopefully lose this fear, already she is staring to want to try and pat some dogs sometimes when she builds up the courage and feels safe. So the view can grow, with education and a feeling of a safety zone. Small steps and safe exposure to new ideas widens the viewpoint.
So we are all marginal thinkers operating in our comfort zone of what we know. For us to expand that we need more knowledge of something, or a challenge/threat to push us out of the comfort zone. To get a win against marginal thinking is to push the world view to being wider than it is.
At one point, people refused to eat crayfish, now they are a delicacy. If the growing world population is to be sustainable, we need to look at cheaper and more efficient sources of protein. Being at the bottom of the food chain with a short lifespan, a bug has far less accumulation of environmental toxins that a cow or even a chicken would. Fancy a no fat Bug Burger, It is actually an amazingly healthy alternative. It is just a matter of viewpoint.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/05/163239/meat-the-food-of-the-future
So, With Marginal thinking and E-waste.
Some Vendors including Dell and HP offer recycling of their products free. But expand this further; There is an increased use of recycled plastic and metal in the components. There is progressively more holistic thinking going into design of equipment to make it more readily recycled when it reaches the end of its life. The delivery packaging is also evolving; very rarely do I see polystyrene in a PC box. More often the packaging is now made of Bamboo pulp.
Price, and difficulty getting an item to a recycler is the usual decision for a marginal thinker to just “toss it.” But there are movements to increase awareness of the consequences. Here, to avoid landfill. The Trash and treasures or the free-cycle movement aim to divert the unwanted but still useful to someone who can use it a bit more. In some ways mirroring wartime sentiments of “repair it and make it last.” The real win, widening peoples view comes down to increasing awareness of consequences. This shifts the decision away from price and difficulty, and more to peace of mind. Ocean friendly Tuna, is more expensive, but it still sells. The actual tuna is no different; the difference in quality that makes it sell is “peace of mind”. Widening awareness is the way to break out of the tragedy of marginal (Narrow) thinking.
Choose this, it has a lower carbon footprint, A lower ecological footprint, Less packaging, Recyclable packaging, is easily recyclable, or compostable, does less harm, or no harm at all. Repair it, Make it last. Choose this because it gives you peace of mind or makes you feel good. Either that or add more chocolate.
I have read both posts with great interest. I see the entrepreneur in Adam and the passionate green tinge coming from Ken. Myself, I am a bit of both, I have looked into a lot of this over the past 10 years and I never seen a real pay day but I remain adamant that the issue of e-waste is special. Today talk is about "green procurement policy" and "corporate social responsibilty". "Product stewardship" in my opinion is built into both the previous concepts but ultimately pushes the corporate spend back on the procuring entity and hence some corporates prefer to just push the problem onto someone else or even worse, just ignore it.
ReplyDeleteIn the general retail community where we pop down to the shop and buy a TV or a computer of some description we (in my observed opinion) tend to look at local options for disposal. Again, my opinion is that a vast majority of consumers will do the right thing if the right options are available and ADVERTISED! The problem with entrepreneurs is that they seem to expect that their idea will be supported because it bears great news for the environment etc. Unfortunatly we have a supply chain issue to deal with and sadly, that is an issue which still remains while we have municiple authorities with differing views on how to manage "waste".
Vince and Ken,
DeleteI love it that the two of you are both commenting on my writing, and really appreciate your thoughts. I reckon I could be blogging for an eternity just on the ideas you give me alone.
I think that Vince is spot on about the sense of entitlement from entrepreneurs in the environment sector. Too often they seem to think that they are owed a fortune just because they've got an idea in the environment. It doesn't, and shouldn't, work like that.
And I think that Ken also has it about right in thinking about marginal thinking. I also have a two year old daughter, and she is not frightened of dogs, but that's because we have a big, licky one and she knows what to expect. I also love how Ken just finds the stuff you want to read to give hope that there are ecopreneurs.
So both present the same argument, in different ways, with different experiences of being belted by bad business models. And Vince, you've scored some beauties. Hopefully a future model can be crafted that doesn't follow the same path. And for both, how about this for a business: http://www.4thbin.com/
4thBin
ReplyDeleteAnyone following this blog will probably by know have seen where I sit here. Apart from being passionate about recycling I am a realist. I have seen businesses develop and I have seen how destructive they can become in the real sense of the whole problem of end-of-life processing of many forms of waste. There are quite a number of businesses similar to 4thbin operating in Australia and in Western Australia. Some of these businesses are doing quite well but most operate with minimal capital injection and with scant regard for quality, OSH and the environmental outcomes. It's really all about making a buck while the market is there.
It's easy to create something attractive with triangular green arrows signifying recycling and to use slogans like "reduce, reuses, recycle". The real problem is to gauge how truely effective these businesses are in the overall sense of environmental outcomes at a global level. I could talk about this for hours but I think you know were I am headed here so let's deal with this as a separate issue.
Here is a double edged sword.. How do you define effective? or Success? Because any process in it infantcy, is inefficient, but if you test something based on a viewpoint different from the maturity or focus of the thing, then you get a negative result. Then because it is given a negative result, that result can affect the outcome of the thing. (And then be misused as proof against its success, even if the proff is for the wrong objective.)
ReplyDeleteI see a lot of testing, and reporting which only gives a current status at best, not any useful report of ongoing quality. It just breeds into "informing the refinery when air quality is being tested so that they don't pollute on that day" corruption from my viewpoint.
In a really odd way I think If 5000 dodgey vendors were out there pushing the "recycle reuse reduce" slogan, I think the overall effectiveness of education would be better served than 3 good vendors struggling to comply with many ever watchful eyes waiting for a failure. There would be some horrible mistakes, and might just disagree with myself later, because this is sounding silly.. but from that chaos, a form of order could arise. No, really I don't know enough..
Ken.
A very interesting post Ken and I very much understand where you are comming from.
ReplyDeleteAny perception of negativity on my part comes from experience and frustration. Having said that I am extremely positive about the opportunities that exist and it's combined input such as this that prevokes thought, uses past experience and generates discusion toward a better way!
Now to contradict myself a little off topic.. But in a similar vein to 5000 dodgy vendors.. Whoever thought marketing wood furniture as being "good" carbon sequestration does deserve to be publicly humiliated. So yes there is need for watchdogs.. But with education, people are actually pretty good at doing this themselves.
ReplyDelete