House Bill To Spur New Gold Rush?

(MoneyWatch)  Democratic lawmakers say there's gold in them thar hills. Or in them thar mountains of electronic waste from PCs, cell phones and other pieces of obsolete IT hardware.

Paradoxically, it might be the hardware manufacturers themselves--Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Apple and Nokia, to name a few--who might be found using sifting pans in the very near future.

The House Committee on Science and Technology plans to introduce a bill, the Electronic Waste Research Development Act of 2009, to support research into new ways of recycling electronic waste, with the intention of helping companies extract value from e-waste and reduce the environmental impact of lead, mercury and other toxins.

But rather than capitalizing on the current craze for green, committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn) is focusing on another color--gold--to tout the bill in his most recent blog post on electronic waste.

[It] contains valuable materials, such as gold, silver, and copper. Scrap electronics are a richer source of these precious metals than the minerals we mine out of the ground. No matter how you slice it, it just doesn't make sense to put gold in a dump.

But this is clearly a market in need of leadership. According to a study by Osterman Research (commissioned by Converge, an e-waste management company), 100% of the 111 IT managers surveyed said they were aware of their companies' e-waste disposal policies--but incredibly, 15% said they routinely put e-waste in dumpsters.

So for every 100 tons of e-waste disposed of by U.S., businesses, 15 tons go straight into landfills, along with the mercury, lead, cadmium, PVCs, brominated flame retardants and other dangerous compounds contained in electronic products.

The disparity between companies knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it can be explained by market fragmentation and a lack of overarching standards. There are just a smattering of companies specializing in e-waste disposal and state laws with inconsistent requirements.

Michael Osterman, who conducted the study, told me that many IT managers had a hard time coming up with the names of vendors who do e-waste management, and even then, "it wasn't top of mind. They had to think hard about it."

Osterman agreed that compliance is further complicated because "there's not really an overarching law that people know."

A new federal law, he said, "is a step in the right direction."

The few companies specialized in e-waste management will soon find they have competition from the hardware vendors themselves, said Osterman--noting that Dell, Toshiba and Apple are already moving in this direction.

Osterman noted that "there's a decent amount of gold that can be extracted."

And with gold near $1,000 per ounce, that's not a waste of energy.