Can a manufacturer close the loop on its own products, or does circularity only work when recyclers, municipalities, and the people designing the next unit are all in the room? On this episode of the Resource Recycling Podcast, host Uriah Kiser talks with Andrea Murphy, Director of Environmental Affairs at Panasonic Corporation of North America. Murphy leads product stewardship for the North American business and chairs the governing committee of Electronics Manufacturers Recycling Management Company (MRM).
Since 2007, MRM has collected more than 1.7 billion pounds of e-waste in the United States. She walks through what a consumer should actually do with an end-of-life Panasonic product (or any brand), how MRM’s zip-code tool and prepaid mail-back program work, and why convenience is the difference between a garage full of old devices and material that reaches a certified recycler.
The conversation covers the persistent patchwork of state electronics recycling laws, the renewed regulatory interest driven by critical minerals, and the practical complications of smaller devices, wearables, and embedded lithium-ion batteries. Murphy recounts a tour of an ERI facility where a sales team dumped a box of personal-care products onto the conveyor. One wet/dry shaver with a deeply embedded battery took more than eight minutes of careful hand disassembly to remove safely — a moment that drove Panasonic engineers to redesign for easier battery removal.
She also explains the company’s green transformation teams and the washing-machine heat-pump relocation that cut repair time roughly in half and saved more than a million dollars a year while extending product life. Murphy discusses the MultiShape modular grooming system (nominated at e-Scrap), the value of certified partners (e-Stewards and R2), and why manufacturers still need recyclers and municipalities in the room.
She previews conversations she expects at the E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference, October 26–28 in New Orleans. If you work in electronics recycling, ITAD, repair, manufacturing, or policy, this episode is a clear look at how one major OEM is trying to move from compliance to genuine circular design. Like, comment, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you don’t miss the next conversation on circular electronics on the Resource Recycling Podcast.
Transcript of episode 7: The Resource Recycling Podcast
Host: Uriah Kiser, Resource Recycling | Guest: Andrea Murphy, Panasonic
Uriah: Can a manufacturer close the loop on its own products? Or does circularity only work when recyclers, municipalities, and the people who design the next unit are all in the room? Hi, everyone. I’m Uriah Kiser, and on this episode of the Resource Recycling Podcast, we have Andrea Murphy.
She is the Director of Environmental Affairs at Panasonic Corporation of North America. Her team runs what she calls product stewardship: the products Panasonic sells have to meet environmental law, retailer requirements, and the company’s own sustainability goals. She has led that work for the North American business since 2019 and sits on Panasonic’s Sustainable Management Consortium supporting green impact.
She chairs the governing committee of Electronic Manufacturers Recycling Management Company, better known as MRM, the OEM consortium that has collected more than 1.7 billion pounds of e-waste in the U.S. since 2007. That is a heck of a lot of e-waste. Andrea, welcome to the Resource Recycling Podcast.
Andrea: Thank you so much. That sure is. It’s a milestone we’re very proud of.
Uriah: Well, I’m excited to have you on, because you and I have had several conversations leading up to this date, and I’ve been looking forward to this because you’re so involved in e-scrap and e-waste. And obviously, we’ve got E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference coming up at the end of this month in New Orleans. We’re all so excited to go and see everyone again and get back together in New Orleans.
But what I want to know first: When a customer in the U.S. wants to get rid of a Panasonic product, or any brand for that matter, sitting in their drawer, what should they actually do, and how sure should they be about where it goes?
Andrea: Your question is so relevant, about how to recycle an electronic product when you’re done with its useful life.
Just this morning, one of my girlfriends was asking me what was in store for my day, and when I told her about the podcast recording, she said, “Oh, yeah, I should watch that or listen to that. I’ve got a bunch of things sitting in my garage right now that I don’t know what to do with.” So this is a question I get from my family and my friends all the time.
For Panasonic-branded products, we partner with MRM Recycling, as you said, and they really strive to make recycling easy. The MRM website is a great starting point for any consumer. They can enter their zip code and find a take-back location. Take-back locations can be through local government, private companies, or big-box retail stores.
And if none of those are convenient, we have a mail-back program where a customer can get a prepaid mailing label and ship in their end-of-life product. I live in New Jersey, and the Department of Environmental Protection here manages an online database of local collection centers. In fact, there’s one even in my small town that’s open six days a week and accepts any end-of-life electronic product.
But as you mentioned, the drop-off… Oh, go on. Sorry.
Uriah: No, I think it’s great. You bring up the municipality, because they are just as much of a partner in all of this, it seems, as the OEMs and those who founded MRM.
Andrea: You’re correct. The municipalities are an important partner, because convenience is the goal. What we’ve learned from the work MRM does is that if it’s not convenient for someone, they’re not going to do it, which is probably why my friend has a bunch of things in her garage.
You might even know, right? It could be something other family members just dropped there. If it’s going to be stressful for her, she’s certainly not going to do it.
Uriah: Making it easy and letting people know where they can take their e-scrap. I guess that’s the starting point for all of this.
Andrea: Yes. And you brought up a good point: What actually happens to it, and how do consumers trust that the right thing is happening? I believe that’s where industry can do more right now. We can pool our resources to provide more education for consumers, because there is a lot of mistrust and a lot of unknowns there.
Panasonic sells a very wide range of products. It would be a real challenge for us to manage that recycling process and have direct relationships with all of the recyclers and municipalities. That’s where MRM comes into play.
They manage that network of partners and recyclers for us. They have policies in place where each recycler has to be certified to the e-Stewards or R2 certification standards, and they go through rigorous auditing processes.
Uriah: Panasonic is no stranger to e-scrap recycling. It helped stand up Call2Recycle in 1994, and then later MRM in 2007, as we mentioned earlier. So after all that, in just the past five years, can you talk about what has actually changed in how take-back works?
Andrea: Yes. I’d like to start by saying I am so proud to work for a company that supported the vision to develop these partnerships focused on the collection and recycling of batteries and electronics. I want to really stress the partnership.
As a manufacturer, there is so much of the supply chain and the end-of-life chain that we don’t have detailed knowledge of. So it’s so important to pick the right partners to help guide us. Both MRM and The Battery Network are longstanding organizations that are good partners for us, and they’ve set high performance standards.
They did this long before the certification bodies even adopted those standards. For Panasonic, we’re still a leader in battery manufacturing, and we need to secure resources for new products and ensure that our end-of-life products are not only staying out of landfills but adding value after their first-generation life is done. MRM in particular successfully runs 20 different take-back programs in the states, plus D.C. And as you mentioned, over a billion pounds of electronics have been recycled.
In terms of the law, though, and what’s changed, I first want to start with what has not changed, because I feel like it’s really significant. It would have been easier on many stakeholders if we had harmonization from the regulators across the different states. I certainly understand the regulators’ perspective: They’re looking out for their own state and the issues they have. But it is such a challenge, and that’s why we need partners to run each different program, with different scopes, different CEDs, different material designated to be in scope, and different timelines.
Do they run a fiscal year, a calendar year, or do some of them go June through July, right? So I really wish we had been successful in harmonizing the regulations.
You had asked about what’s changing now. I feel like there’s renewed interest in the end of life of electronics, and that’s likely due to critical minerals and the acknowledgment that we’re going to need more of these critical minerals to keep manufacturing products, and they’re going to be harder and harder to come by. The states were really quiet for many years, but in the past two to three years we’re seeing a change in the types of end-of-life electronics regulations, and also growth in them.
I think part of the reason for the change is the products we’re collecting. We’re no longer seeing the heavy CRTs, but rather much smaller and lighter TVs. We’re seeing computers change from the old desktops to laptops: a lot less plastic, more critical minerals involved.
Products are also getting smaller with wearables, and electronics are embedded into so many more things than they were in the past. We’re also seeing products with embedded batteries, and that adds a whole additional layer of complications. So we’re really seeing the laws expand right now to cover these new products, things like cell phones, gaming consoles, entertainment devices, and wearables that we weren’t seeing before.
For MRM in particular, those changes mean we need to grow the availability and number of recycling partners we have. That’s just the whole industry evolving.
Uriah: A follow-up on harmonization, because so much of what we write about and cover at Resource Recycling is that it’s a patchwork of states with their own separate rules. We’ll call them silos here, right, because they all seem to have their own set of rules. But to your point about harmonization, are the states talking to each other now that there’s renewed interest in all of this? Are they doing a good job, do you think, or could they do better?
Andrea: There’s always room for improvement, but I’m really positive about the conversations we’re having, especially at E-Scrap. So many of the state regulators attend.
It’s such a wonderful opportunity to have the regulators there talking to each other, along with the manufacturers and the recyclers. And going back to partnerships: You have to have all the right people in the room, and you have to learn from them. From what I hear from the regulators, it’s too hard to change the statute.
So it would be a monumental push to change these regulations. I can only hope that going forward, any new regulations will be in line with the ones already in play.
Uriah: All the right people will be in the room at E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s October 26 through 28 in New Orleans. Where else would you rather be? I’ll make sure to drop all of that information into the description of this podcast.
So if you don’t have your ticket already, you can get your ticket and come be a part of that conversation and see what this is all about.
You and I had a great exchange before we came on, and you told me a very cool story about what happened when Panasonic found out that an embedded battery in a personal-care device changes the entire recycling line. Walk me through this. I want you to share it with our audience. What did you learn, and what did it teach you about working with a recycler?
Andrea: Definitely. It may seem basic on some levels, but it highlights the strengths of each stakeholder and what we can learn from one another. I’m really excited about our nomination at E-Scrap for Panasonic’s Take Back for Tomorrow program, which is around personal-care grooming products, specifically our MultiShape.
The MultiShape was nominated because it features a single rechargeable, battery-powered handle that clicks onto multiple attachments. So you reduce the need for duplicate motors, batteries, and chargers. And what really made this program unique is that it started as a vision from our sales team.
They were about to launch this product and were asking a lot of questions: If you had five different grooming products and now replaced them with one, what’s going to happen to those five products? So they came to my team and asked a lot about recycling. They said, “What do you mean it goes to a recycler? What happens there?” So we actually flew out to one of our partners, ERI, at their Indiana facility.
And like any typical sales team, they showed up with a big box of random brands of personal-care grooming products. When we started our tour at intake, they dumped the box out on the conveyor belt. As we walked through the tour and learned about the different operations in the recycling facility, we saw our products go through.
In particular, one wet/dry personal-care shaver had an embedded battery. It got pulled out because it couldn’t go through ERI’s automated system; they weren’t able to get that battery out safely. It has a lithium-ion battery, and you certainly don’t want to crush that in a machine. We’re all well aware of the fires.
So it wound up going through the whole facility to the battery center in the back. A person was assigned to take it into a safe area and, with a set of hand tools, try to get the battery out. We’re thinking, this person does this all day long. They’re so skilled, this is going to take two minutes. It took over eight minutes for them to get that battery out.
Uriah: Wow. Wow. Right, that’s a long time.
Andrea: To us as the manufacturer (to me representing recycling, and to my sales team), this was not an obvious problem. To our design teams, this was purposeful. You want that product to work in the shower, with water, and outside the shower. That battery was embedded deep inside the handle for a good reason.
But hearing ERI’s side of it, they told us it’s going to be very expensive to dismantle this battery. And there are safety concerns if it doesn’t get pulled out soon enough and goes to get shredded at some point. They want to scale their operations. They want to be efficient.
So they’re like, “Hey, manufacturer, you need to find a way to make this battery more easily removable.” That was really the light-bulb moment for us. It’s how we do collaborative knowledge sharing with our partners, which is so necessary to get the full picture of that circle.
What we’re doing now is having our engineers work on redesigning that product so the embedded battery can be removable. It’s not as easy as we’re hoping it will be, but that’s the goal for us.
Uriah: Right, because you still want the product to work, as you said, in the shower or wherever the user needs it. So you have a challenge there: to meet user demands, but also to make it more e-scrap recycling friendly, to get this battery out when you need to. But it’s amazing to me what happens when you get people talking to each other, because you learn all of this. I thought that was great.
Andrea: Thank you. Yeah, I agree. We need to be out collaborating a whole lot more than we are now.
Uriah: Well, design, as you’re talking about here, is kind of the other half of all this. MultiShape and repair center networks are meant to keep products in use. So how do you advocate for that while working in a company that also has to focus on selling the next unit?
Andrea: Exactly. As we’re talking about this collaboration, it needs to be fully circular: not just the manufacturer and the recycler, but all stakeholders at every stage of the product lifecycle. What we’re working on now is a concept called manufacturing for disassembly. Panasonic is over 100 years old, and our teams have really perfected efficient manufacturing.
For much of that time, they focused on things like how to make the product more energy efficient, how to make it last longer, how to have it use fewer resources. But looking at the circular economy differently from the old “reduce, reuse, recycle,” we now have a focus on repairability and dismantling. And just as you’re saying, this was a really hard gap for us to bridge. It’s hard to connect all the different departments within a manufacturing company to really figure this out.
So we developed what’s called a green transformation team, and they sit inside each of the manufacturing divisions. They’re able to take the data, partner with all the stakeholders, and present it in a way that makes sense in the big picture. The best example I have of that is our washing machines.
This newly formed green transformation team heard about repair times and failure points for washing machines. They took in all that data, analyzed it, analyzed the design, and realized that the biggest cost in time, materials, and labor for fixing a washing machine after it had been in use was fixing the heat pump. That was the most common cause of failure.
And it wasn’t because of complicated technology. It was because of where the heat pump was placed inside the washing machine. The design teams had this heat pump, probably the most expensive part of the washing machine, secured right at the bottom in the center, and they didn’t realize how costly or inconvenient that was for a customer if it broke.
So the green transformation team suggested: What if we move this heat pump to the top of the machine, where it’s easily accessible? And what if we maintain it instead of just waiting for it to break? It was a very simple move for them to redesign the machines.
Now the heat pump is placed where it can pop out and be vacuumed to remove all the dust that collects in there. That’s allowing the heat pump to have a much longer lifespan than when the dust couldn’t be removed. It also resulted in a 50% reduction in repair time.
From a manufacturer’s standpoint, this is a cost saving for our own service teams, and a new cost center we were able to create by adding annual maintenance service. It actually takes less than 10 minutes now for the repair technician to go in and do that vacuuming. So it’s a new service that saved the company over a million dollars annually. It’s not a trade-off. You’re not giving up one thing.
You’re finding something that makes the product last longer, so fewer resources reach their end of life. But it takes a lot of collaboration and a lot of data to do that.
Uriah: It also sounds like you have to be open to innovation.
Andrea: Definitely. Open to innovation, open to hearing from teams, which is really why I’m so excited about the E-Scrap Conference. We’re going to be able to have a lot of those conversations, or at least start them, and I can take them back to these green transformation teams to research.
Uriah: Well, I can’t wait to see you at E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference, October 26, 27, and 28 at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans. And congratulations on being nominated for your awards. I can’t wait for the awards ceremony. We’re actually going to have a gong show at the awards ceremony.
This is the big boss’s idea, she’s very excited about it, and she’s asked me to host it. We’re going to invite people to come up for 60 seconds and share their talents. They can sing a song, do a dance, whatever they want. We’ll showcase their talents and have some laughs and some fun. And I get to host the thing. I’m so excited about it.
So we cannot wait to see you, Andrea, in New Orleans, as well as all of you. Again, I’ll drop everything in the description of the podcast, and e-scrapconference.com has all the information you need. Andrea, thanks so much for coming on the Resource Recycling Podcast.
Andrea: Thank you for having me. This has been a great discussion.
Uriah: And if you want more great discussions like this, please like this video, share it, hit that bell notification and subscribe button, and download our podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you on the next Resource Recycling Podcast.
