KEY POINTS:
As this Herald story shows, TV makers may face having their larger TVs banned from going on the market here if they don't meet power-consumption standards set out by the Government.
The same issue has just reared its head in Australia as both countries begin to clamp
down on emission and energy standards for household goods.
The electronics industry has anticipated this. Every international technology showcase I've been to this year has been dominated by news of new initiatives and technical measures to improve the energy-efficiency of electronics.
TV makers in particular are in a bind. People are demanding increasingly large TV screens - 42 inches and above, but these screens consume more power to run.
Low power consumption probably comes further down the TV-buyers list than screen resolution, contrast ratio and overall aesthetics, but the simple fact is that unless TVs become more power-efficient as they get bigger, their makers are going to face regulatory action to keep them off the market.
There's another problem, one that's yet to be adequately tackled in this country - making sure electronics at the end of their life are disposed off in an environmentally-friendly way.
Too many old TVs, washing machines, fridges and heaters still end up in landfill plots in this country. There's been some progress made in recycling computers, but the bulk of consumer electronics taken to the tip or left out on the curb during the increasingly infrequent inorganic rubbish collections ends up being crushed and put in the ground.
That's a far cry from what happens in Japan where stringent laws have been introduced to ensure electronics such as TVs, washing machines and fridges must be 50 - 60 per cent recyclable.
Japan, a nation of tech heads, discards 23 million electronic items each year, around half of which are recycled. A good portion are also refitted and resold in developing nations.
In Yashiro, just outside of Osaka last week, I visited the Matsushita Metec plants where some of the condemned electronics end up. It's an impressive facility, a disassembly line where TVs, air-conditioners, washing machines and fridges are systematically stripped of their toxic bits, stripped down and reduced to raw materials that can go into making everything from new electronics to floor tiles.
The best bit of the process is when the fridge or washing machine gets tossed into the industrial shredder. Giant steel teeth seize the item and chomp it to pieces.
I saw a big fridge mulched in seconds. Elsewhere, workers slice cathode ray tubes from old TVs in half, stripping out the lead and leaving the glass fronts to be pulverized and re-used.
Matsushita has developed an efficient method of sucking the CFCs out of old fridges so they are not released into the atmosphere when the fridges are destroyed. Some of the processes used to separate the disassembled pieces are ingenious. Centrifuges split heavier particles from lighter ones while vibrating conveyer belts throw off some fragments while others are left behind.
I was surprised at how efficient the whole process is. It was like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory but with heavy metal as the main ingredient. It's also something we could learn a lot from as we seek to reduce our landfill deposits here.
