Utah Passes E-waste Bill With No Collection Mandate, Registration Fee

The CE industry hailed the passage in Utah of an e-waste bill (SB-184) that it says is consistent with what it wants to see nationwide. The measure was voted out of the Legislature last week, and it doesn’t have a collection mandate or goal. The CEA is also backing a Texas TV recycling bill (SB-329) that passed the Senate Natural Resources Committee Wednesday with amendments that the group proposed. A Washington bill (SB-5824) that failed to get out of committee last week, would have expanded the state’s e-waste program to cover several CE peripherals, including videogame consoles. But state regulators are girding for the bill’s resurrection in the next session of the Legislature in January, according to a source in the state Department of Ecology.

The Utah bill requires makers of covered CE products to report to the state on “collection opportunities” for recycling of e-waste from consumers and to do consumer education. “We think those are two of the most critical pieces of any recycling program or infrastructure,” said Walter Alcorn, CEA vice president of environmental affairs. The bill also doesn’t require device makers to register with the state, so there’s no registration fee, he said. “It is one of the first bills that we have seen that is not a patchwork bill.” The bill is designed to “encourage industry to incorporate recycling into everyday practice,” he said.

In Texas, CEA proposed amendments to SB-329 under a Recycling Leadership Program, Alcorn said. They include an option for TV makers to meet requirements of the law by operating 200 collection locations in the state, as an alternative to a market share financing system. If they meet that threshold of 200 collection sites, TV manufacturers can use participation in a industry-led “leadership” program to comply with the law, Alcorn said. “Similar to the Utah bill, the idea is not to add to the burden of the state patchwork, but to encourage TV manufacturers to incorporate electronics recycling into everyday business practice."

Environmental groups aren’t opposed to giving TV makers the flexibility to meet collection and recycling obligations through an industry-led program, said Robin Schneider, executive director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment. But CEA’s proposals don’t impose “enough accountability” on TV makers, she told us. While manufacturers in other states are required to file annual reports with the state on how much electronics they collected, there’s no such requirement in the CEA alternative proposal, she said. There’s also a concern that the collection sites under the industry-sponsored program would be concentrated in urban areas, she said. Her group will push when the bill goes to the House for approval for provisions to ensure more manufacturer accountability, she said.

The Washington bill would have expanded the state’s e-waste program to include videogame consoles, DVRs, printers, speakers, external hard dries, small-scale servers, routers, modems and a host of other devices. It would also have converted the financing system from one based on return share to a market share system. A market share system would ease the burden on regulators by doing away with the “fairly intensive” process of sampling waste coming to processors, said the source in the Department of Ecology. The return share system has worked alright for Washington, but “it’s not something that we would want to necessarily fight to stay with,” he said. “If we have a good market share system, we will be open to that."

Washington regulators already were planning to expand the covered product list to include e-readers, he said. If a version of SB-5824 comes up in the next session, as “we expect it might, we probably won’t push for doing our own expansion because it is going to cover quite a few items.” Regulators are in a “kind of waiting mood right now to see what we want to grab next” for inclusion in the list, he said, if there isn’t a “legislative proposal to do so.”