GLITCHES IN E-WASTE LAW STILL BEING WORKED OUT
People Often Don't Know Where They Can Bring Old Electronic Equipment - May 5, 2005

by KARL SCHOENBERGER, Mercury News

California's groundbreaking Electronic Waste Recycling Act has been in effect since Jan. 1, but the law is still a mystery to many residents who want to get rid of their electronic trash.

The E-waste Act is better known at the cash register, where consumers learn they have to pay a surcharge of up to $10 when they buy a new computer monitor or television. The special tax is meant to fund an ambitious plan to safely recycle old and discarded cathode ray tubes, classified as hazardous waste.

Yet confusion sets in when a consumer wants to find out how to safely and conveniently recycle that hazardous old monitor or TV in the attic. There's a daunting patchwork of 212 state-approved e-waste collectors out there -- 25 in Santa Clara County -- and nearly every one has a different policy for handling your trash.

Some will take it off your hands for free, others will charge you $20 a tube. One local collector charges to take the monitor, but waives that fee if you throw in the rest of the old computer's system. Another charges piece by piece to collect the central processing unit, keyboards and mouse, but takes the monitor for free.

To figure what's best for you, you need to navigate a state agency Web site and locate a list of approved collectors in your county, then call them, one by one, for details. Convenient free pickup of e-waste at the curbside is not in the cards. You'll need to haul it to a warehouse or a collection center.

''Time will tell how the system is going to work out,'' said Joe Rigazio of Hackett Electronics, a state-approved e-waste collector in San Jose that takes whole computer systems for free but changes $20 if it's just a monitor. ''There's a lot of paperwork involved, and I might have to wait two months to get my money from the state after hauling the monitors to the recycler. But I'm happy if this stuff isn't going into a dump or on its way to a Third World country.''

Cliff Pierce, an author and retired pilot from Redwood City, wrote books on the ancient PC he rolled into the state-approved e-waste collector GreenCitizen in Palo Alto Wednesday. He found out about the collection site in a newspaper article, and had never heard of the new law. He was happy to pay $16 to unload the computer, keyboard and printer, and surprised when they took his monitor for free.

Got new computer

''This thing started acting funny and would conk out on me, so I got myself a new Dell,'' said Pierce, 82. ''I'm a collector of historic artifacts, but there was no room for this in my garage. It just got in the way.''

James Kao, chief executive of the for-profit GreenCitizen, said customers usually make three visits to his warehouse, behind the Fry's Electronics store in Palo Alto.

''First, they come by to check us out and get information,'' Kao said. ''Then they come by with an old monitor, because that's free. Then they come again with all sorts of stuff after cleaning out their basement. It's like they've been waiting for a place like this. It's a bottled-up demand.''

Matt McCarron, a senior e-waste specialist at the state Integrated Waste Management Board, said the new law requires certified collectors to offer free drop-off of old monitors and televisions to the public once a year, but it was up to the private vendor or municipal waste handler to decide their own business model. Word has been slow to get to the public on the availability of the new services created by the law, he said.

''In general we had a pretty good start-up,'' McCarron said. ''But we thought it was going to be much more.''

The city of Palo Alto landfill is an approved collector that charges $20 per monitor to residents, $25 for non-residents. But city official Sean Kenney said the dump would stop charging for monitors and televisions July 1, anticipating eventual payments from the state program that would cover most of the overhead on handling them.

Apple Computer has a state-approved collection site it sponsors with Cupertino. Apple spokesman Fletcher Cook said monitors are taken for free. But it wasn't clear whether the monitors would go into the state recycling system. ''If it's not on our Web site,'' Cook said, ''it's not information I can publicly release.''

System-mandated

The Recycling Act, also known by its shorthand bill number, SB 20, mandates a Rube Goldberg system of collection and recycling, taxation and compensation.

The map goes like this: Surcharges collected from consumers at stores go to the Franchise Tax Board, where the money is transferred every three months to the Integrated Waste Management Board, the state agency managing the system. The board doles out 48 cents to approved recyclers for every pound of e-waste product containing cathode ray tubes. The recyclers, in turn, are supposed to pay 20 cents a pound for the material they get from collectors.

Eventually, the income from the sale of new tubes should balance out with the cost of recycling. In July, the income stream will increase when the law expands to cover plasma screens and liquid crystal displays. A total of $67 million is projected for collections from the retail surcharge from the 8.3 million units this year, according to the state.

But there are skeptics.

''The effect of SB 20 is that it's focused on end-of-life recycling, and it's screwed up the idea of reuse of these old products,'' said Steve Wyatt with the San Francisco non-profit Computer Recycling Center, which rebuilds used computers to ''help bridge the digital divide,'' and operates a collection center in Sunnyvale.

Before SB 20 went into effect, Wyatt said, his organization charged $9 to collect an old computer monitor. Now that it accepts them for free, he figures the typical compensation from the state recycling system at 20 cents a pound will amount to about $5 to $6 a unit.

''Since March, our volume in computer monitors has doubled,'' he said. ''We know this is all supposed to cost itself out, eventually -- at least that's what they say. But it sure is tough.''

ONLINE RESOURCES
A list of e-waste collectors approved under the SB 20 recycling system can be found on the Web site of the California Integrated Waste Management Board Web site at www.ciwmb.ca.gov/Electronics/Reports/ApprovedSearch.aspx.

For more information on SB 20 and other e-waste recycling issues, visit the IWMB's Electronics Home page at www.ciwmb.ca.gov/Electronics.

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