E-waste and regulatory opportunism

Wall Street Journal on Friday published a report that E-waste like discarded computers and other electronic goods in the West are sold to and dumped in China before being exported back to the West. It is like a return trip for the E-waste but in a different form. For example, the jewelry pendants exported to US could contain hazardous elements from the E-waste.

So who should be blamed in the E-waste issue?

For the United States and other developed countries, they need to deal with the large quantity of electronic waste, but the cost of complying with the environmental protection regulation is high so that they sell the E-waste to China where the regulation is very lenient. In academic term, it is called regulatory opportunism.

Now China has become the biggest reciever of the E-waste, which becomes a major source of pollution to China, in particular south of China. this is a mutual process. On one hand, the west has strong incentive, due to the draconian environmental regulation, to get the high-tech rubbish to foreign countries, on the other hand, China needs such waste to continue maintaining the low cost and low price of their exports.

But we live in an era of globalisation, even the movement of the wing by a butterfly in the South America could stir off a storm or hurricane in North America. As Giddens said, the locality could be shaped by what happens at long distance. No wonder that the waste discarded in the waste and dumped in the west could be returned although it has been transformed into another form.

The Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) has been adopted by an increasing number of developed countries to deal with the management of e-waste. It is aimed to “shift the responsibility upstream toward the producer and away from municipalities.” This regulatory approach creates incentives for producers to consider, even at the design stage, the subsequent disposal and recycling of used products, and to participate as key players in the entire system of end-of-life management.