Background - October 16, 2008
On the 10th of June Greenpeace challenged Philips to become an environmental leader and move out of the red zone in the Greenpeace Electronics Ranking Guide and Philips accepted our challenge. More specifically Greenpeace asked Philips, as a first step, to publicly commit, to setting up a take-back system for its end-of-life electronic products globally and to re-evaluate its position on individual producer responsibility.
Specifically Greenpeace is asking Philips to:
a) Set up free and easy take-back for all your products
globally, ie wherever they are sold, starting with Argentina,
India, Russia and Thailand. In relation to this we expect public
communication of timelines and take-back program details for the
countries mentioned above.
b) Support individual producer responsibility (IPR) as
established by article 8.2 in the European Law on waste electronics
(WEEE Directive). We understand that the position on article 8.2
Philips submitted to the WEEE Directive revision consultation
process shows that Philips is lobbying actively against IPR in
favour of Collective Producer Responsibility (CPR) . Furthermore
Philips continues to make confusing public statements on collective
recycling systems (see below). Philips should take a clear and
public position supporting financial individual producer
responsibility and recycling systems that differentiate the real
costs of recycling its own products.
In relation to both of the above Greenpeace expects coherence
with these policies in the shape of clear pro-active engagement in
ongoing legislative discussions on electronic waste both in the EU
WEEE directive revision process and in the process of developing
electronic waste laws with IPR in countries such as Argentina and
India.
1) Philips continues to make
public statements supporting `collective (or semi-collective´)
recycling systems or schemes´ without clarifying whether they mean
they support collective financing of all e-waste recycled in these
systems, ie sharing out the costs of the recycling of their e-waste
with other producers, or whether they are simply arguing to
continue to be allowed to use a COLLECTIVE scheme (ie shared
physical infrastructure) irrelevant of how the financing is
structured. In other public statements (see pages 14 and 15 of the
Philips Submission to the EU consultation on the revision of the
WEEE Directive) they contradict their supposed support for IPR in
their web-based policy statements with a clear demand for
'extending the collective financing for WEEE lamps'.
More explanation of the differences between collective
financing and collective systems.