Where computers go to die

Hewlett-Packard is the exception. The company opposed the California law but supported Maine's bill, which much of the rest of the industry, including Apple and IBM, fought hard -- and failed -- to defeat.

"We're not against recycling, but we didn't like the idea of the advanced recycling fee," says David Lear, Hewlett-Packard's director of environmental strategies and sustainability. "Our preferred program really is having a shared-responsibility model. It gives us incentives to do it right, to design our products better. If we don't have any role in recycling, we can't get our materials back. We don't want to put in time up front if we don't really have a way that we can pull it out."

Hewlett-Packard is currently running a free nationwide promotion with Office Depot that invites consumers to bring a myriad of electronics -- regardless of manufacturer -- into stores to have them picked up for recycling. HP's goal is to recycle a billion pounds of hardware by 2007.

In its initial form, the California bill sounded similar to the legislation that Maine enacted in April 2004. In Maine, electronics manufacturers will be required to set up consolidation centers throughout the state, where municipalities can drop off dead TVs and computers, for free, to keep them out of landfills, explains Jon Hinck, a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, an organization that lobbied for the bill's passage.

"It's a closed-loop system that encourages design change. If they [the manufacturers] have to take it back, then they're going to say: OK, we need to make it easy to recycle," says Eleanor Whitmore, a program director for the Texas Campaign for the Environment.

Consumers might well wonder whether manufacturers will simply cover the costs of the Maine plan by raising prices -- the result being no effective difference between the Maine and Californian recycling approaches from the buyer's point of view.

But Hinck says that recycling doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. "We all know that the private entities are going to be better at putting efficiencies into the systems than the public entities. If we have the manufacturers playing in this waste game, then they're going to drive the system to make sure it's efficient."

In other words, the manufacturers will look for ways to lower the costs of recycling early in the design process, which will help to keep overall costs down.

California and Maine have both banned toxic monitors and TV screens from local landfills, explains Kara Reeve, the national coordinator for the Computer Take Back Campaign. But such bans can cause as many problems as they solve. Once prohibited from landfills, where should the old monitors go?

"Right now there's no financial incentive at all for a local government to tell the public that [electronics are] toxic," says Mark Murray, executive director of the nonprofit Californians Against Waste, "because that means that the public will bring them the toxic waste, which has to be managed as toxic waste at the cost of $25 or more a unit. Illegal disposal is free."

Next Page: Will consumers remember to do their duty?

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