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Excerpted from The Whig-Standard article “E-waste not, want not” by Paul Schliesmann.
Scott Environmental is the largest e-waste collector in Kingston with a massive facility on Fortune Crescent. It is filled with discarded electronics that will make their way to one of a dozen processors around the province, including Sims in Mississauga.
Scott picks up the TVs, monitors and computer stacks from Kingston-area retailers, or accepts them directly at the plant, in a dumpster at the back of the building.
The components are sorted, stacked and plastic-wrapped in boxes that must be less than six feet in height. Batteries are removed and stored separately.
The products then sit at Scott Environmental until [Ontario Electronic Stewardship] calls to say which processing plant is ready to take the goods.
Under this tightly regulated system, no processing plant has to contend with material shortages.
Processors are also allowed to find their own private customers, and those transactions are also subject to OES regulations.
Ontario Electronic Stewardship is guided by a board of directors comprised of industry representatives from some of the biggest electronics makers and retailers in Canada.
The chairman is from Sony of Canada Ltd. He is joined by members from Home Hardware Stores, Best Buy Canada, Dell Canada, Hudson’s Bay Company, Sears Canada and Hewlett Packard.
OES maintains a fee schedule based on the types of items sold in Ontario. The stewards pay, for instance, $26.25 on a television larger than 29 inches, $12.25 for a computer monitor, all the way down to 40 cents for a computer keyboard.
While the $71 million in stewardship fees was paid upfront by the retailers and importers, many pass these costs on to consumers.
As of August 1, the fees will be reduced on some products because there is still $20 million remaining from the $71 million collected in 2010.
Hochu says the directors, despite their direct connections to electronics, have no conflict of interest when it comes to making decisions on behalf of OES.
“These programs are all set up as industry-led organizations so the manufacturers and im-porters and retailers are helping to lead and drive the programs,” she said.
“This is an industry stepping up to assume responsibility for managing end-of-life electronics.”
McGill University professor Thomas Naylor doesn’t agree.
“It’s a classic corporate green-wash system,” said Naylor, who teaches an ecological economics course and is the author of a new book, Crass Struggle: Greed, Glitz and Gluttony in a Wanna-Have World.
Greenwash is the term used to describe corporations that claim to be acting in environmentally sensitive ways but really aren’t.
Like many academics in urban planning and environmental economics schools across the country, Naylor believes the North American consumer-oriented lifestyle, fuelled by cheap and disposable goods from developing nations, is driving us to the brink of environmental destruction.
“Recycling is a fraud. It was set up to dissolve bad consciences,” he said. “We have to recycle ourselves in terms of our ideologies of consumption.”
To learn more about Crass Struggle, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the authors, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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