Toward More Sustainable Electronic Waste Management in the United States: Assessment of Consumer Preferences for e-Waste Accumulation, Disposal, and Willingness to Pay for Green Electronics

The growing global volume of electronic waste (e-waste) demands more sustainable management approaches because its improper disposal threatens environmental integrity, represents a health hazard, and it is a lost economic opportunity if the valuable materials it contains are not recovered. The United States is the largest generator of e-waste in the world. However, its recycling rates are discouragingly low and an integrated approach to e-waste management is lacking. Drastically increasing collection and recycling of e-waste, together with eliminating toxic materials from electronics production are seen as two broad approaches to confront e-waste challenges. This dissertation explores public participation in electronics consumption and disposal critical to these approaches. I rely on environmental economics (contingent valuation) and discrete choice econometric models (count, ordered logit, generalized ordered logit, and multinomial logit) to analyze a unique dataset that is representative of the U.S. population. My analysis combines internal (beliefs, attitudes, and pro-environmental behavior) and external (socio-economic, demographic, and geographic) explanatory variables to (a) estimate the number of obsolete television sets stored in U.S. homes and the volumes of potentially toxic and also volumes of valuable materials they contain, (b) explore the value people place on improving environmental quality derived from using environmentally benign ("green") cell phone by measuring their willingness to pay for a green phone, and (c) understand the effect of e-waste disposal bans on household actual and intended disposal decisions.;My research findings provide policy recommendations for more sustainable e-waste management in the United States. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency needs to revise its methodology for quantifying e-waste and the considerable volume of junk televisions stored calls for a more focused national policy to deal with the potential dangers of leaded glass in cathode ray tube displays. People are willing to pay for green electronics, which is good news for green chemistry initiatives. State bans on disposing e-waste are mostly infective, so jurisdictions strained by current fiscal challenges could benefit from designing targeted informational campaigns on community recycling and states should consider implementing economic incentives for consumers to return their e-waste instead of enforcing disposal bans.