Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 09 January 2008 15:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
So, it seems that the industry has been working on this for most of the decade with little to show so far. However some progress has been made. In September 2007, the AIIA in conjunction with Sustainability Victoria launched
Byteback , an industry partners Apple, Canon, Dell, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji-Xerox, HP, IBM, Lenovo, and Lexmark. It intends to provide places where you can drop off old IT equipment.
Its September 2007 press release promised that "based on the initial Byteback trial run by Sustainability Victoria and Hewlett-Packard in Camberwell, Victoria, Byteback will expand to include nine Victorian sites and will run until the end of 2008." It website still lists Camberwell as the only pick up location.
So over to the US where, with no industry-wide or government involvement private enterprise has come up with a solution. NEW Customer Service, which claims to be the US's "leading provider of extended service plans and buyer protection programs for consumer products," has launched ecoNEW - billed as "a trade-in and recycling service that helps consumers get rid of their older, unwanted electronics while at the same time providing them with an easy-to-use, environmental solution for e-waste recycling."
It is being offered in conjunction with retailers as a value-add. This is how it works: consumer enter information about their electronic item on a website; EcoNEW places a trade-in value on the product and provides the consumer with a prepaid shipping return label to ship the item in for verification Once the item has been received, a gift card specific to the retailer for the trade-in value is sent to the consumer for use however he or she chooses. Items which have no trade-in value are accepted for recycling. According to NEW, these include CRT monitors, printers, fax machines, and small home electronics.
I don't have full details of how the scheme works. Clearly there would be a substantial cost in shipping an old CRT monitor, which somebody would have to wear, and packaging the product for shipment would likely deter many people from using the service rather than dumping the product on the street.
But without doubt the solution provided by Dell in Australia is clearly optimal, and has the potential if applied to all major brands to capture a significant percentage of old equipment. The per-item collection costs of such a scheme clearly reduce significantly with increase in scale.
