How a good news environment story
and a teaching opportunity were lost

By Jay Arthur
For some time now there has been growing concern about the amount of computer equipment in our basements and what happens to it if and when we get around to taking it somewhere for recycling or disposal.
I don't think that too many of us seriously believe there is much recycling going on. It just doesn't feel right to see a thousand bucks worth of hardware that you handled so carefully when you brought it into the house being tossed into a dumpster. But the reality is that while the metal may get recovered for scrap the rest--the plastics, the glass, the wiring--will likely end up in a landfill somewhere, or worse, being taken apart by hand in a small village in China where environmental protection is unheard of and pollution is everywhere. We've all see the documentaries.
So you'd think that when the Province of Ontario announced its e-waste program this month, the stories would be about the relief we all felt that not only would the material be properly managed, it would not be done on the backs of the taxpayers, as it is now.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way, and while it's easy to blame the media for leading with the eco fee angle, a great chance was missed to set the right tone up front.
There has been a debate going on for some time about whether fees for handling the end-of-life management of products should be visible or invisible.
Industry, not wanting to mess with the marketplace doesn't want anything to increase the price of its products on the shelf, so if money needs to be raised to cover a new expense, industry prefers it be added on at the till, and shown separately as an eco fee of whatever euphemism may be appropriate. That way the consumer can blame the government, not the fact that these things have to be paid for by someone. (It always makes me smile when even the most fervent believers in "the market" become socialist when it comes to taking responsibility.)

Visible fees go against the grain of promoters of extended producer responsibility who rightly argue that the proper management of products should be treated no differently from any other cost- like raw materials, assembly, transportation etc.--so should not be shown separately.
Governments, particularly those with unfortunate baggage in the taxes and truth department, would prefer to see nothing that could be regarded as a tax anywhere on the sales receipt.
Which brings us nicely back to Ontario, where premier Dalton McGuinty had just released I Will Not Raise Your Taxes II--to decidedly unconvinced reviews and echoes of "Yeah, right."
So when the environment minister announced the e-waste program and the good news that industry (read consumers) would finally cover the cost of the end-of-life management for computers and televisions, there should have been included in that statement a very firm stipulation that the costs would be internalized.
That way, the good minister could make the appropriate comments about how the cost of managing the end of the product's life needs to be covered every bit as much as the manufacturing part and we'd better get used it because we are living in a greener Ontario under the Liberals now etc. etc.
Instead, no such comment was made and this opened the door for industry, no doubt responding to media questions,  to not only speculate on whether there would be an eco fee, but how much it might be. And of course, that became the story.
Everyone was just doing his or her job. You do have to wonder though that if the money angle is always so important, why there aren't  more stories about the free ride the producers of consumer goods have had all these years, courtesy of municipalities (read taxpayers).
It's a shame because there really is a good news story here, and we all know that competitive forces in the market place (and the ever falling prices of e-products) would have meant little or no increase in the price.
Sigh.