- One of the overarching objectives recommended for the scheme’s framing is to prioritise life cycle management interventions from the top of the waste hierarchy i.e., reuse before recycling wherever possible, and those that place a heightened focus around waste avoidance.
- To make and track progress in this area, the accredited scheme manager is proposed to work with all scheme service providers and encourage e-product diversion from scheme recycling channels for reuse and/or repair wherever possible, and report scheme diversion performance annually – this will help to create market drivers and financial incentives for scheme participants to extend e-product life cycles as much as possible.
- The recommended scheme framing is centered around circular economy principles where e-product reuse, recovery, and end-of-life management considerations are integrated at the design stage with the aim of improving the environmental performance of e-products throughout the entire life cycle.
- Acknowledging that different e-product categories are further along in terms of repairability, reusability, and recyclability than others, the recommended staggered scheme implementation framing option splits a circular economy setting into three ‘threads of circularity’ – i.e., recovery and recycling, repair and reuse, and product design – and has a primary and secondary focus for each e-product category over the scheme’s short-, medium-, and long-term timeframes across these three threads.
- The progression of each e-product category through the three timeframes, and respective primary and secondary focus areas, is recommended to occur based on each e-product category’s ability to:
- meet the primary focus objectives of the current timeframe; and
- be assessed as sufficiently mature in respect to recyclability, repairability, or product design to move to the next timeframe.
- For example, in the scheme’s short-term where recovery and recycling is the primary focus for a given e-product category, and if this is working as it should and suitably qualified repair agents are widely available, the e-product category will be assessed as sufficiently mature with respect to recovery and recycling and will shift to the scheme’s medium-term timeframe where reuse and repair becomes the primary focus, with a secondary focus on product design interventions.
- E-product repair and reuse initiatives provide a number of benefits within the interest of national supply chains, such as retaining valuable resources locally and creating local skill-based jobs.
- To further support e-product repair, reuse and life cycle extension activity as part of scheme operations, it is recommended that the New Zealand Government provide ongoing grant funding support for vocational training in NZ’s e-product repair and refurbishment sectors – to ensure a sufficient number of local repair technicians are available to enable the expansion of e-product repair and reuse focus for all e-product categories under the scheme as soon as possible.
