What public support has there been for the computer take-back campaign and other e-waste recycling programmes?
There’s a lot of support at the local level. Most people have been accumulating their old electronic products in their own homes and they don’t know what to do with them. Often, they look to the local government for a solution and the local governments don’t have solutions. It’s too expensive for local governments to run their own recycling programmes for electronic waste. Consumers are continuing to demand more of government. But we think that the solutions cannot really be a government-run solution. It has to be a solution that focuses on the companies themselves. And that’s why this concept of individual producer responsibility is so important. That, I think, is probably the most important breakthrough initiative we are involved in. If we can change the way people think about producing products to include the end-of-life costs in the sales price of the product itself, then companies can compete with each other to develop products that are easier to recycle. And if they can do that i
