News

Watch Craig Lorch, owner of Total Reclaim and EcoLights Northwest, articulate product stewardship's purpose in 60-seconds of testimony before the Feb. 5 House Environment Committee hearing on paint stewardship (HB 1571):

In a Next City article, Who Will Pay America’s $1.5 Billion Recycling Bill?, Matt Prindiville of Upstream provides this concise summary of extended producer responsibility (EPR)'s purpose:

The Washington Dept. of Ecology has created a Guide to Curbside Collection of Electronics Through the E-Cycle Washington Program (PDF), available on the E-Cycle Washington website.

With 249 collection sites across the state, 185 sites collect all covered products (bulbs, tubes and HIDs) and 64 sites collect CFLs only (compact fluorescent lamps). More sites will be added in the future. In the first six weeks since the Jan. 1 program start, 250 boxes of lights have been recycled and there were more than 1,000 searches of Ecology’s 1-800-Recycle site.

UPSTREAM published a three-part series by Dennis Kinsey about the CHANGES recycling centres in British Columbia and the challenges of retail take back of recyclables.

With LightRecycle Washington underway, Washington local governments may have questions about how the program affects Coordinated Prevention Grants (CPG): read the Washington Dept. of Ecology's FAQ on CPG and Product Stewardship.

As garbage tonnage decreases, so does the revenue to fund recycling programs. UPSTREAM (formerly PPI), while acknowledging that the "100% producer-financed and controlled model" of product stewardship is controversial, highlights other creative solutions to finance recycling and infrastructure improvements on their Upstream blog.

In the December 2014 issue of Resource Recycling magazine (PDF), Scott Cassel, CEO and founder of the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI), highlights recent achievements in product stewardship and extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws and programs, and looks to the way ahead, including activity on specific products and industries.

The Washington Dept. of Ecology notes in a Dec.

In the wake of the September Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Alameda County’s 2012 medicine take-back law, trade groups of the pharmaceutical industry petitioned the Supreme Court on Dec. 29, 2014 to hear their challenge to the law.