All we are saying...is give EPR a chance

By Jay Arthur

The thinking behind the requirement for a plan for e-waste in Ontario was a bit of a departure for a province not exactly seen as a leader in stewardship issues.
For the first time, stewards were being required to bear the full cost of end-of-life management of their waste.
Could this actually be extended producer responsibility (EPR)? In Ontario? Well, not quite yet.
As with so many other items, the blue box being the prime example, municipalities in Ontario have been picking up the slack on behalf of product manufacturers for years. Some local programs have been collecting local waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE ) since the 1990s, with the good old municipal taxpayers subsidizing the cost.
Now we seem to be on the brink of something totally new: full EPR.
As with all things, a plan has been developed, outlining how the stewards intend to fulfill their commitments. The plan builds on experience in other provinces and envisions a number of collection scenarios including municipal depots, retail outlets, collection events or "round-ups" and the not-for-profit sector, to name a few.
The organization whose mandate it is to provide the program, Ontario Electronic Stewardship (OES)--or  whoever is contracted to provide the service--would then send a truck to collect the stuff and deliver it to consolidation centres and then processing sites.
Sounds pretty straightforward so far.
But there are criteria attached to how OES will want the material handled. It is understandable that it wants to do it right and meet its due diligence mandate, but doing it right costs a lot of money.
Segregating the different WEEE categories, loading it on one-way pallets, wrapping it snugly in shrink wrap and making sure that the items not covered by the first phase of the program don't slip into the mix all costs big bucks.
For this activity, a compensation of $165 per tonne is being proposed, irrespective of the actual costs incurred by the "collection agent".

Somewhere, the concept of full EPR fell off the table.
Now, many municipalities will look at this per tonne compensation as a gift from the gods--and why not?
It's certainly a lot better than the $0 per tonne they currently receive, and a truck will come to their door to take the stuff away, to boot. 
But is this flat fee really what EPR should look like? Is it anywhere near the true cost of managing collection sites? Who knows?
It is pretty clear that a small program that only collects, say, five or six tonnes annually is going to be a big-time loser under this formula. Payments of $900 a year wouldn't even cover the administration costs.
And if WEEE from the industrial, commercial and institutional sector is to be included as part of the requirement (and those guys have a lot of e-waste), then local taxpayers everywhere could end up subsidizing the difference between OES payments and the real cost.
If EPR is to send the signals required to producers, then costs must be realistic. It takes full EPR to drive design-for-the-environment, penalizing producers who continue to flood the market with goods that are obsolete almost as soon as you buy them, or designed in such a way that they can't be affordably repaired one month after the warranty expires. Design that includes durability or adaptability should be rewarded.
0000So here's a radical idea.
0000What if municipalities that currently provide a local taxpayer-subsidized WEEE program took a break for a year or two to see how things go with the new OES program.
Perhaps they should step back and give EPR a chance.
Industry associations are always telling municipalities how efficient the private sector is, and here is their opportunity to prove it.
Let's ban the stuff from municipal collection and disposal channels and see what happens when industry is allowed to shine.
Who knows? We might all learn something.