EU, China put pressure on N.A. electronics makers to get clean
This isn’t about cleantech per se, but any electronics manufacturer producing or selling their products in Europe will be keeping a close eye on EU environmental directives going into effect between now and next August. They’ll also be watching China and Japan as they create similar directives.
In a nutshell, the EU is requiring all makers of electronics wanting to do business in Europe to have recycling plans in place for their products. By next summer, companies will also have to meet limits placed on the amount of harmful substances in their products — i.e. lead, cadmium, and other nasty stuff.
This is major news. I mean, what company doesn’t sell their products globally and consider Europe and Asia major markets? No North American electronics manufacturer can afford to ignore these directives.
But making the necessary changes will come at a big cost, and major effort. New directive-compliant components will need to be sourced out. Manufacturing processes will need adjusting. And then there’s the administrative burden of documenting all the changes and proving it to authorities.
The big guys — Celestrica, Sony, HP, Dell, etc… — have already been working on this and are apparently ahead of the game. The smaller guys? Some are just waking up to the reality, and those with long product cycles may be caught sleeping.
Some are calling this the Y2K for electronics manufacturing. Others are saying it’s just another example of the EU throwing its weight around by creating another trade barrier, similar to privacy directives a few years ago that caused a major stir with U.S. e-commerce companies wanting to do marketing in Europe.
This BusinessWeek article explains the whole issue quite thoroughly. For anybody interested in how regional government policies can force industry change, this is a great read.
Not surprisingly, it will be EU policy that — once again — forces Canadian and U.S. governments to play catchup. Glad some parts of the world care more about the environment.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
