Washington State Weighs Adding E-Readers to Electronics for Mandatory Recycling

After surpassing e-waste collection projections for 2010, Washington is weighing adding products to the state’s list of covered electronics. To begin with, the Department of Ecology is looking at including electronic readers to products that must be recycled, said Miles Kuntz, manger of Washington’s E-Cycle program: “We are still doing some research on that.” The state collected 39.5 million pounds of e-waste in 2010, more than a million pounds more than 2009. Washington’s e-waste law took effect in 2009.

The department is leaning toward classifying e-readers as monitors, Kuntz told us. With the fast-changing electronics market, “the products that are coming out are blurring the lines,” he said, making them hard to “fit into neat little categories anymore. But we feel like the e-readers do meet the definition of the monitor.” Classifying the devices as monitors means the department need not go back to the legislature to “do a re-amendment of the law,” he said. “We feel like we've got the authorization to do so."

TVs accounted for 63 percent by weight of the e-waste collected in 2010, monitors 27 percent and computers the rest. “A lot of people seemed to think that after the first year of a program there would be a drop off because people would have cleaned out their garage and got rid of the electronics lying around,” Kuntz said. That didn’t happen “basically because a lot of folks did not know about the program in the first year,” he said.

Kuntz said he believes the electronics landfill ban that took effect last year in neighboring Oregon helped to bump up collection in Washington. “It is really hard to quantify that but the fact that some of our municipal solid waste does go to Oregon and those folks that ship their stuff down there were under a tighter level of scrutiny did have an effect,” he said. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is “spending more time” now making sure that the “loads coming in are meeting the ban,” he said.

LCD and plasma TVs started appearing in the waste stream last year, Kuntz said. “We can’t quantify it because we have to spend time to [do] some actual counting, as opposed to weighing which is a lot easier to do.” His estimates from his “walk-ins” at processing units are that flat screen TVs account for as much as 10 percent of devices coming into the electronic waste stream, Kuntz said. Technology exists to recycle flat screen TVs, he said. Washington doesn’t have collection targets, but Kuntz said he expects 2011 e-waste collection to end up in the 35 million-40 million pound range.