Product stewardship schemes are used around the world to improve the life-cycle management of a wide range of products including, but not limited to, packaging, mattresses, mercury containing lamps, tyres, agricultural chemicals, even unwanted medicines, by shifting physical and/or financial responsibility to producers. Product stewardship seeks to ensure that some or all responsibility for the end-of-life management of a product (being the collection, resource recovery, recycling and residual disposal) is wholly or partly fulfilled by the product manufacturer and / or brand owner. New Zealand’s Minister for the Environment approved project funding from the Waste Minimisation Fund (WMF) to assist in the development of a product stewardship framework for ‘e-waste’ through stakeholder engagement and consultation, collection and analysis of e-waste data specific to New Zealand and analysis of product stewardship options for e-waste. In order to assess the end-of-life management of e-waste and consider an appropriate product stewardship option, this project fundamentally examined whether e-waste is an environmental problem that the market does not address and whether product stewardship is an appropriate approach to effectively manage e-waste. It is impractical to consider all e-waste as a single entity; it is more appropriate to examine distinct categories of e-waste. This project has examined 11 categories of e-waste. The e-waste categories were assessed using currently available research, knowledge of the current situation in New Zealand together with stakeholder advice and feedback in order to determine how product stewardship may address the issues of:  Potential environmental harm of the e-waste product(s);  Potential resource benefit from recycling or recovery of a product(s);  Whether the product(s) can be effectively managed through a product stewardship scheme;  Whether there is evidence that the product(s) can be effectively managed through a voluntary product stewardship scheme; and  Public concerns about potential environmental harm. This study accessed and reviewed existing information on e-waste in New Zealand through inviting stakeholders to provide data, accessing existing reports and studies and undertaking desktop research. It was not within scope to undertake empirical research. The reasons for using data to inform policy decisions are well documented. The value of having evidence based policy is that it can; Provide some rigour and objectivity;  Be used to estimate and/or measure the impact of proposed change in policy;  Assist the decision maker(s) to select programme(s) to suit their needs; and  Provides a tool to demonstrate the need to others. Good information and evidence can provide an important base for rational assessment of options and from which other factors can be adjudicated on. There can also be risks associated with purely making decisions on data which is not considered reliable, however, it can be very useful as part of a broader decision making process, particularly where datasets are large, flexible and reliable. In this study, SLR has determined that the level of robustness of New Zealand specific data for ewaste products is currently insufficient to satisfy the requirements of the priority product designation criteria as detailed in Section 2.3 of this report. Although priority product designation and the need for a regulated scheme were supported by a number of stakeholders and stakeholders indicated that reasonable robust data was available and would be forthcoming, it is SLR’s view that the information provided and reviewed for this study does not satisfactorily prove that current management of e-waste in New Zealand causes significant environmental harm and that significant benefits could be achieved through e-waste management under a regulated product stewardship scheme. The study includes a review of existing e-waste schemes, whether voluntary, regulatory or a hybrid. This review finds that all types of schemes, including regulated schemes, have inherent advantages and limitations. For example, the Australian National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme established in 2011 required changes in 2013 and it is again under review over concerns of inappropriate treatment of e-waste materials and the scheme potentially reducing recycling of nonscheme e-waste. While this study cannot recommend priority product designation, the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) may choose to undertake an alternative process to establish a pathway to designation or support processes to increase e-waste recovery and recycling outside of a regulated product stewardship scheme. The MfE may also have other regulatory mechanisms that can be explored as a means to support increased e-waste recycling. The issue of incomplete and inaccurate data on New Zealand’s e-waste has made the task of trying to develop a framework for managing this waste stream more difficult. A number of recommendations for improved data collection and management of e-waste are presented in the table below. Industry stakeholders may also consider options for increasing e-waste recycling which, may also assist in developing sufficient data to inform future any consideration of a regulated product stewardship scheme. The final framework presented in Section 5 of this report is intended to be used as a tool for determining whether a product is suitable for management under a product stewardship approach and what other complementary regulations might be used to support improved e-waste management.