Too Big to Fail, Too Academic to Function: Producer Responsibility in the Global Financial and E‐waste Crises

Without doubt, both the financial and electronic sectors bring tremendous prosperity and development to the world. But both face severe criticism and a serious crisis. Both industries have complex products and fierce competition. In the financial crisis, banks put too many complex and bad loans on the market. Brokers and traders tried to maximize short-term profits by dividing up debt and repackaging loans via credit default swaps. This led to sacrificing long-term quality of financial products and bringing the entire industry close to a global crash. As such, there is nothing wrong with debts or mortgages, unless they are not paid back by consumers and become toxic debt. Similarly in the e-waste domain, toxicity is spread by traders and brokers that divide products into pieces, cherrypick the valuables, and leave the environmentally risky parts like cathode ray tube (CRT) glass, cooling agents, andmercurycontaining components to society. Also, electronic products only become toxic waste when they are not returned and recycled properly. In both cases there is consumer demand for cheap products that become harmful when the risks of the financial and electronic products are excluded from the product price. In both crises, government is inattentive to irresponsible behavior. As a result of lacking enforcement, public opinion responds with strong calls not to bail out the financials, and realistic proposals to avoid a global financial system collapse face strong resistance. Equally, in the e-waste crisis, the public expresses a simplistic demand to forbid toxic products, while product functionality inevitably requires the use of potentially harmful substances. Finally, in the financial crisis, ratings agencies overlooked the interwoven character and systemic risks of the market. Their equivalents in the electronics industry, the environmental watchdogs, likewise focus on simplistic benchmarks of producers alone rather than the complex systemic problems in the e-waste field with the many actors involved.