Importing extended producer responsibility for electronic equipment into the United States

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that holds manufacturers accountable for the full costs of their products at every stage in their life cycle. EPR typically involves requiring that producers take back their products at the end of their useful lives, or pay a recycling contractor to do so, thereby internalizing the costs of recycling or disposal in a manufacturer’s bottom line. When companies know that they will bear the costs of product return and recycling, they are more likely to redesign their products for easier and safer handling at each step in the life cycle. This approach “enforces a design strategy that takes into account the upstream environmental impacts inherent in the selection, mining and extraction of materials, the health and environmental impacts to workers and surrounding communities during the production process itself, and downstream impacts during use, recycling and disposal of the products” (EPR Working Group 2003, 2). In short, by requiring a company to take its products back, EPR aims to force the company to make the products cleaner in the first place. The idea of applying EPR policy to electronics arrived in the United States in the 1990s as a welcome import from Europe. This chapter traces EPR’s adoption by coalitions of U.S. environmental, labor, and health activists seeking a comprehensive policy solution to the health and safety threats posed by the high-technology industry’s internationalization

Accountability Issues in the Supervision of Lay Pastoral Ministry

The accountability issues in the supervision of Lay Pastoral Ministers enrolled in aLay Ministry College are explored

A Functional Imaging Study of Cooperation in Two-Person reciprocal Exchange

Cooperation between individuals requires the ability to infer each other’s mental states to form shared expectations over mutual gains and make cooperative choices that realize these gains. From evidence that the ability for mental state attribution involves the use of prefrontal cortex, we hypothesize that this area is involved in integrating theory-of-mind processing with cooperative actions. We report data from a functional MRI experiment designed to test this hypothesis. Subjects in a scanner played standard two-person ‘‘trust and reciprocity’’ games with both human and computer counterparts for cash rewards. Behavioral data shows that seven subjects consistently attempted cooperation with their human counterpart. Within this group prefrontal regions are more active when subjects are playing a human than when they are playing a computer following a fixed (and known) probabilistic strategy. Within the group of five noncooperators, there are no significant differences in prefrontal activation between computer and human conditions.Neuroeconomics; Exchange; Trust; Theory-of-Mind; functional Imaging of brain

From Water Quality to Riparian Corridors: Assessing Willingness to Pay for Conservation Easements Using the Contingent Valuation Method

This article reports a survey to elicit public response to a proposal to fund a purchase of a conservation easements program to protect an environmentally sensitive riparian corridor. The results from two versions of the contingent valuation method (CVM)--a payment card and a referendum--reveal that mean household willingness to pay (WTP) is $16.80 and$29.16, respectively. Factors influencing WTP include proposed cost, age of respondent, and individual sense of local environmental priorities. This type of study represents an important opportunity for Extension educators to assist local officials as they struggle to make policy decisions regarding a variety of public projects