Minnesota's multi-stakeholder approach to managing electronic products at end-of-life

Abstract

A public-private multi-sector team collaborated to test a variety of management strategies to remove end-of-life (EOL) electronic products, primarily residential, from municipal waste in Minnesota. Objectives for the project included: evaluate a series of collection techniques sponsored by local governments and retailers; test the cost effectiveness of private sector market-based infrastructure to recover value from the material collected; identify infrastructure development needs; and use the findings as a basis for influencing future direction and policy-making decisions in the State of Minnesota. Two primary goals were identified: (1) evaluate collection and processing costs for a targeted stream of used electronic products; and (2) evaluate scrap markets for secondary materials generated by this product stream. The project highlighted the strengths of each organization to create the first large-scale multi-stakeholder effort to remove used electronic products from municipal waste in North America. Various collection strategies were employed during a three month period to remove used electronic products from multiple sites. Used electronic products collected during the project were processed, evaluated and sold to existing secondary material markets as well as to "high end" recovery markets. This paper presents the results of this effort as of January 2000.