Oregon DEQ Proposes Recycling Credits in Draft E-Waste Bill

E-waste programs run by manufacturers or the state contractor would get recycling credits if they exceed the shares that they are required to collect and recycle in a calendar year, under a bill drafted by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. The draft e-waste bill is for introduction in 2011, the department said. A few lawmakers have shown interest in sponsoring the bill, and they may end up changing the bill to add devices to the list of electronics products covered by the law, a department official told us.

Oregon now has one state program, run by the National Center for Electronics Recycling and three manufacturer operated programs. E-waste programs will be entitled to recycling credits if they exceed “the program’s return share by weight for a calendar year,” the bill says. A program will get one recycling credit for each extra pound of electronics collected, and it can keep all or parts of its credits or sell them to another program “at a price negotiated by the parties,” it says. Under the measure, a program could use recycling credits it earned or bought to meet up to 15 percent of its return share obligations in a year, but the Environmental Quality Commission can change the percentage.

Programs must report their recycling credits in their annual reports to the department, the bill says. The reports should include information such as the number of credits a program had at the start of a year, the number of credits it bought or sold during the previous year and the names of programs from which credits were purchased or to which credits were sold. The bill was devised with “stakeholder input,” said Kathy Kiwala, manager of Oregon’s electronic recycling program.

The draft bill will be among the topics at a meeting Wednesday of the E-Cycles Advisory Committee in Portland. The group will also discuss how the bill could be modified to include new products to be covered by the recycling law, said Kiwala. Products mentioned include computer peripherals and DVD players and gaming devices, she said. Also up for review are electronics program reuse guidelines put in place at the start of the state’s e-waste recycling program in 2009, Kiwala said. The state-run program and two of the manufacturer programs already have reuse programs, she said.