Overcoming barriers

EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) is an environmentally preferable purchasing tool for electronic products based on specifications established in a set of American national standards. The EPEAT system includes a Web-based registry of products, available at www.epeat.net, that conforms with the standards. Having a product on the EPEAT Registry opens many doors to institutional purchasing for electronics manufacturers.

The standards are developed through a consensus-based process involving a group of diverse stakeholders. These stakeholders have agreed to more than 50 environmental criteria in each of three standards:

• IEEE 1680.1, adopted in 2006, covers personal computers (PCs) and displays;
• IEEE 1680.2, adopted in 2012, covers imaging equipment, such as printers and copiers; and
• IEEE 1680.3, adopted in 2012, covers televisions.
   

Currently both IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and NSF International are developing standards for servers. IEEE and NSF are ANSI- (American National Standards Institute-) accredited standards developers.

Each standard includes required and optional criteria. All required criteria must be met for a product to be placed on the registry at the bronze level. Optional points accrue to earn a product silver or gold status. Because purchasers like to buy silver and gold products, the optional criteria create healthy marketplace competition for improved environmental performance.

The system is designed for institutional purchasers, such as governments, hospitals, universities and large businesses. In the United States and in the 42 other countries listed on the registry, EPEAT designation has become a market requirement for selling into the institutional sector. Consumers also can select products from the registry, though much progress needs to be made to promote green purchasing in this sector.

EPEAT operates in the crowded world of ecolabels, where it is distinguished from most others by its market penetration. While most ecolabels have tens, or rarely hundreds, of conforming products, EPEAT has thousands.

One reason EPEAT has so many products registered is its efficient structure. Manufacturers self-declare the conformance of their products onto the registry when they are ready for the market rather than going through time-consuming precertification process. This has greatly extended EPEAT’s reach and its impact on the environmental performance of products, but it also necessitates that EPEAT operate a very rigorous process of verifying manufacturers’ claims. This is done through continuous rounds in which verifiers investigate those conformance claims in detail. This is an especially complex process for recycled plastics.

PCR plastic use

Each standard used on the EPEAT Registry has criteria that incentivize use of recycled plastics—some are required and some are optional. All criteria specify the use of postconsumer recycled (PCR) plastics. In contrast, postindustrial recycled content—that is, plastic that is recycled out of factories and that never makes it into consumer use—does not earn credit because this is a routine process. To earn EPEAT credit, PCR plastic must have been made into products, then used by consumers and then recycled.

Manufacturers are required, in some cases, to declare certain information about the product on the registry. They must report the percentage of recycled plastic in their products. This declaration can be zero because PCR plastic is not required for PCs and displays. However, manufacturers may earn optional points if their products contain enough PCR. The evidence in the accompanying graphs reflects data taken from the registries for PCs and displays. Data are presented for desktops, notebooks and computer displays. Figure 1 (above) depicts the number of products that contain at least some PCR plastic over the period since the registry was launched.

The PC and display standard also includes optional criteria for products that contain either 10 percent or 25 percent PCR plastic, as shown in Figure 2 (below).

As seen in Figure 2, within two years of the EPEAT Registry launch, more substantial use of PCR had begun. Within six years, real competition to use PCR was occurring.

But what does this represent compared with the complete set of products on the EPEAT Registry? Figure 3 (below) provides insight into this area.

As seen in Figure 3, the overall number of products registered climbed in 2009, after EPEAT had established its strong role in the market. After the total products leveled out in early 2012 (because of new Energy Star specifications that came into effect and, therefore, reduced the number of registered products, or orders from EPEAT to manufacturers to remove out-of-date products), the number of products with PCR plastic continued to climb so that about one-third of registered products contain PCR plastic.

How does this compare with all products sold? Worldwide sales of EPEAT-registered PCs and displays in 2012, as reported by the Information Technology Industry Council, account for about 27 percent of the worldwide market share, and considering the huge market for those products, it would be safe to say that this represents a significant boost to the plastics recycling industry from the electronics industry.
 

Challenges to overcome

First and foremost among the challenges to overcome is that PCR plastic must be fully competitive with virgin resin—in performance, aesthetics and cost—to gain a sustainable place in the market. This requires both high-quality collection and sorting systems as well as technologies for processing PCR resins. Many of these still need to be developed.

A major manufacturer needs a large and reliable supply of PCR plastic to promise that every unit of some product it produces will contain the material. This infrastructure is being built. There is nothing like market demand, such as that generated by EPEAT, to create the confidence that an investment in such a system will be rewarded. However, development will continue to be gradual.

Also, from the manufacturers’ perspective, to integrate a new, environmentally preferable material into their supply chains requires considerable time and effort—multiple levels of approval must be gained, engineers and designers who are reluctant to try unproven materials must be convinced; extensive testing must be undertaken; and selection and negotiation with new suppliers must occur. This is, of course, the reason it took companies more than two and a half years before the demand for PCR shown on the EPEAT Registry began to take off.

From the standard developers’ perspective, a lack of confidence that supply will be forthcoming is a barrier to requiring the use of major quantities of PCR. The material now being produced and consumed as shown by EPEAT Registry data is an excellent start, but more infrastructure and demonstrated quality of product will be needed for stakeholders to have the confidence to make stronger required criteria.

Furthermore, if a marketplace credit is to be awarded to manufacturers for using PCR plastics in their products, supplier claims about their materials must be fully and readily verifiable. This is critical for EPEAT and similar programs but also for the manufacturer who must purchase volumes of material from a factory far away. Can one just run a test on plastic to determine how much PCR plastic it contains? Unfortunately, unlike other preferable materials called for by EPEAT, such as materials free of toxic substances, there is currently no accepted analytical test for PCR content.

One of two possible solutions can be pursued. One is the development of such an analytical test, and work is being undertaken to this end. The other is to develop a worldwide plastic material supplier verification system that—through on-site audits, examination of purchasing records and mass balance calculations—can verify material content claims.
 

Evolution of PCR criteria in EPEAT standards

There has been an evolution in the EPEAT PCR content requirements from the first PC and display standard to the most recently completed standards for imaging equipment and televisions. The PC and display standard contained only one required PCR plastic criterion, which had manufacturers report on the amount of PCR plastic used. As described, the criteria for 10 percent and 25 percent usage were optional. Thus, the driver for increased usage was less influential than many environmental advocates and purchasers wished for.

The 2012 imaging equipment standard raised the bar with the addition of a new requirement for the use of a certain amount of PCR plastic in all products registered to EPEAT. That amount is small—only 5 grams for products containing more than 100 grams of plastics. In spite of the desire by some stakeholders for more, that small amount was agreed upon because the overall quantity of PCR plastic supply is unknown. Printers contain a lot of plastic, and even a small amount in each device registered in EPEAT could amount to a large market for PCR plastic.

Moreover, the criterion accounts for supply disruptions. The imaging equipment standard states that a manufacturer will not be found in nonconformance if PCR is lacking at some time in light of “temporary circumstances beyond the … [manufacturer’s] control”. These, of course, must be reported and justified.

The most promising impact of this small requirement is that each and every manufacturer of imaging equipment registered in EPEAT must develop a system for sourcing and using PCR plastics. This will, in the long run, be an important step toward driving development of the infrastructure and paving the way to greater usage in the future.

The stakeholders working on the television standard could not agree on a required PCR criterion. The concern by manufacturers is that the great majority of plastics in televisions are in the housings, posing aesthetic concerns.

It is still too early to see how these requirements will play out in the market; EPEAT will be keeping an eye on this.

Currently the stakeholders who are developing the new NSF standard for servers are considering criteria that will incentivize the use of PCR derived from waste electronics, which as demonstrated by Dell’s initiative to use PCR plastic produced by its electronic scrap recovery process (See sidebar above), is a next logical step.

The main content of this paper was originally presented at the Plastics Recycling Conference in Orlando March 12, 2014. It was prepared by Wayne Rifer, director of research with the Green Electronics Council / EPEAT. He can be contacted at wayne.rifer@greenelectronicscouncil.org. Rifer presented the paper on a panel that also included Scott O’Connell from Dell and Bill Long from Wistron GreenTech.