*NEWS*DELL PUSHES TEXAS E-CYCLING LAW

[Anonymous]

Dell pushes Texas e-cycling law
Texas proposal would force vendors to accept and recycle used equipment.
Electronics
manufacturers will have to collect and recycle outdated PCs — but not
TVs — from consumers in Texas, according to a bill working its way
through the state legislature that could become a model for other
states.According to the legislation, called House Bill 2714,
manufacturers would have to place a sticker on any computer or monitor
they wanted to sell in the state, informing consumers that they may
return the equipment to the vendor for recycling or reuse without
paying an additional fee. Each manufacturer would then have to file an
annual report to state regulators listing the weight of computer
equipment they have recycled or reused.

PCs and computer
peripherals put out in curbside trash end up in landfills, where they
can leach lead, mercury and other toxins into the environment.”Texans
generate a massive amount of ‘e-waste’ every year — enough to threaten
to overwhelm our landfills, let alone poison our air or water. But I
believe that if we partner with manufacturers who are increasingly
concerned about the issue, we can find a better home for our aging
computers and iPods,” said the bill’s sponsor, Texas state Senator Kirk
Watson, in a statement on his Web site.The bill passed votes in the
state Senate and House of Representatives in May and awaits a signature
from Texas Governor Rick Perry. A spokeswoman for the governor’s office
confirmed on Friday that Perry had received the bill, but said he had
not yet announced whether he would sign it by the June 17 deadline.

Despite
the bill’s smooth progress through the Texas statehouse, some recycling
experts warn that it is incomplete.The bill has a good fiscal
structure, since it assigns environmental responsibility to the PC
manufacturer instead of the consumer, the state or the landfill
operator, said Ted Smith, senior strategist for the .But the bill is
flawed because it focuses only on PCs and their peripherals, instead of
covering a wider array of electronic equipment.”We prefer the ‘producer
responsibility’ approach rather than the consumer fee approach, so that
part we like,” Smith said. “However, the Texas bill only applies to
computers and not to TVs — this is a major weakness and is as a result
of Dell’s lobbying position. TVs are just as toxic and problematic as
computers and we favor a comprehensive approach that covers both.”

Dell
Inc. has a major corporate presence in the state, since the world’s
second-largest PC vendor has headquarters in Round Rock, just outside
of the state capital of Austin. On Friday, Dell denied opposing the
inclusion of television sets in the law, but said that TVs do not fit
easily into standard PC recycling streams because they include
different components than computers and have a far longer
lifecycle.”Our focus was ‘Let’s make sure that IT and consumer
electronics get in there, and if legislators want to put other
electronics in the mix, that would be fine with us.’ But what we didn’t
want to do was to slow or stall the process of the legislation,” said
Dell spokeswoman Colleen Ryan.In fact, if the law passes in its current
form, it would have no impact on Dell’s current recycling policies,
since the company already offers worldwide free recycling of used Dell
equipment, she said.”Our take is that the marketplace is best
positioned to address recycling, and that the legislature shouldn’t
collect fees or create new government infrastructure for recycling. We
think Texas is an opportunity to set an example for the rest of the
nation.”

Dell is now working with policymakers in several other
states to create the same type of “market-driven” approach to
recycling, including electronics recycling bills now pending in North
Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Tennessee, she said.
Those bills have a different model than existing laws in California,
Maine, Maryland and Washington, which impose taxes on consumers or fees
on vendors in order to fund government programs that administer the
recycling programs, she said.Despite the criticism of its lobbying
efforts, Dell has announced a handful of recycling and power-efficiency
iniatives in recent days. On Friday, Dell said that the EPEAT
government procurement awarded its highest rating to Dell’s Latitude
D630 notebook PC, as well as the OptiPlex 740 and 745 desktops. Dell
also announced a plan on Tuesday to reduce the carbon intensity of its
global operations by 15 percent by 2012, helping reduce the amount of
greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.”We ultimately think
this [state bill] is the simplest, most effective way to recycle
outdated electronics, and we hope the governor sees it the same way,”
Ryan said.

[Author]

June 12, 2007 at 2:23 PM