When Obama administration officials announced the recommendations in the long-awaited report on electronic waste management, electronic giants Sprint Nextel Corp. and Dell Inc. were on hand to reaffirm their commitment to designing “greener” products.
As part of the national strategy to manage e-waste, the report said sustainable electronics should include more recycled materials, fewer hazardous and virgin materials, and the items should be built in a way for maximum recycling recovery.
Green product design is rarely far from the mind of Darren Beck, manager of corporate responsibility for Sprint. He said the company has begun to look at the lifecycle of its products, from construction to recycling.
“Once you take steps to remove the hazardous waste materials from the productґs design phase,” Beck said, “what youґre left with isnґt an e-waste problem, but a waste problem.”
Sprint has begun doing that, with four phones it calls eco-friendly, including a smartphone based on the Android operating system, called the Samsung Replenish.
“Weґve done right by taking a lot of the hazardous materials out of the product,” Beck said.
Gone are the toxic brominated flame retardants, the toxic metal beryllium, intentionally added polyvinyl chloride and phthalates, he said. For the Replenish, 82% of its weight is made from recyclable materials and 34% of its plastic case is made from post-consumer recyclable materials.
“We would like to get to the point where none of our phones contain any type of hazardous materials and they are easily upgradable,” Beck said. “We would love for them to be fully and easily recyclable.”
Dell, meanwhile, takes its designers to recycling companies so that they can better understand what happens when their products are broken down, said Mike Watson, director of corporate compliance for the companyґs take-back policy. The designers get to watch the items being deconstructed and learn how the components will go toward additional uses.
The designers leave those sessions with a better understanding of what makes a material easy to recycle and what doesnґt.
“It drives a different sense of awareness and visibility into our end-of-life [electronics] from the very beginning of the process,” Watson said.
Watson and two other colleagues from the Dell environmental affairs team completed a white paper on design for recycling. They are also surveying their recyclers about what types of parts would be good inside computers so recyclers can more easily break them down.
“We might ask them about one material over another, or if we should include clips versus screws on certain products,” he said. “We try to look at all the things that impact the end-of-life and the demanufacturing of our products.”
Still, customer feedback is important, too, and recycling doesnґt necessarily drive the design process.
One example of that is painted plastic, which is often found on the outside of laptops and various other products.
“The consumers like it, but recyclers absolutely hate it,” Watson said.
Both Sprint and Dell have extensive take-back programs and recycling goals for the future. Sprint wants to recycle nine out of every 10 phones it sells by 2017; the companyґs rate in 2010 was 34%.
Dell officials said the company diverted more than 150 million pounds of end-of-life electronics from landfills last year, a 16% increase over the previous year. Dell is about two-thirds of the way toward its goal of recycling 1 billion pounds of e-waste by 2014.
The companies, along with Sony, have agreed to share recycling data with the U.S. EPA and require its recycling facilities to account for each device. The data, according to the EPA, includes the total amount of used electronics collected in each state, the amount recycled and the amount of each company collects from businesses, institutions and consumers.
Making that data easier to collect begins at the design stage.
“Manufacturers only respond to the requests they receive,” Sprintґs Beck said. “They are able to respond to greener requests as they come in. The key has been, up until recently, they havenґt had a significant demand for that to happen.”
Source: Waste & Recycling News
By Jeremy Carroll