Some Highlights:
- Europe is a leader with regard to sustainability and enforcing strict requirements.
- The US follows but not too close.
- Latin America and Asia have a mixed bag of regulations.
- The four most challenging countries are China, Brazil, Philippines and India for large global organizations.
- Expertise in each country, either internally or from reputable ITAD firms, is essential to maintain compliance when transporting e-waste or assets with potential value.
Todd’s assessment:
Todd Zegers,
President & CEO
Circular Integrity
info@CircularIntegrity.com
(949)346-1683
If you look at the key regions of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America, each one of those regions is very different. When you look at who’s leading and who has some of the stricter requirements, it is Europe. They always lead on the sustainability front and doing things the right way. I would say the US is probably not a close second, but definitely second. But when you get into Latin America and Asia, it’s a mixed bag. I think Latin America is very lax on requirements down there in my opinion, as far as the environmental side of things. When you get into Asia, you know where if you operate in China versus in India versus Singapore, there are three very different aspects and even Australia, which has a very high cost of doing business. Singapore is small but it is very heavily regulated, very structured. You get into China, it’s a bit of a free for all. India is a mixed bag because you have the Special Economic Zones and Non-Special Economic Zones and how those operate and how you do ITAD in India can vary greatly depending on where your business is located and whether you’re a large multinational that has a presence there, with a headquarters in the US, versus a company based in India.
You move into Brazil, for example, the taxation laws there are super complicated. You look at like the Philippines, for example, where you have to do a debonding process before you even take your assets out of commission and out of your operations.
I think the four most challenging countries, when I look at a large global organization, are China, Brazil, Philippines and India. Those four countries typically have some of the most complex requirements and you look at the very large organizations, most of them tend to have operations in those, whether it’s a call center in the Philippines or a drug manufacturing arm down in Brazil or in India, or different activities going on in China.
In Germany, for example, if you’re going to a client site and you’re picking up their e-waste, if you’re transporting waste, it’s very different than if you’re saying you’re going to pick up assets, because those assets may still have value, so until they get back to our plan that we assess where they have value or not, it’s still an asset. It’s not e-waste. In contrast, if you’re asking your ITAD provider to pick up e-waste, that can cause some complexities because of those transportation laws.
So I think having expertise in almost every country is very important, whether that’s your own people internally or having a reputable ITAD firm, again whether that’s an ITAD firm that maybe based in the US but is global for years and they know how these different things work and all these different markets are going out and finding who are the best in class ITADs in these different markets that will help educate me and get me up to speed so I don’t do a bunch of things with an ITAD that doesn’t know what they’re doing and come back and get hit later, because I’ve seen it happen.
