Dive Brief:
- Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed an electronics recycling bill to save underfunded electronic recycling programs in the state.
- The legislation requires manufacturers to increase the amount of items they have to pay to recycle by 10 million pounds.
- Rauner signed the bill because the previous legislation was outdated and made it unnecessarily difficult for local governments.
Dive Insight:
Dean Olson, head of Will County's Resource Recovery and Energy Division, believes that the bill is only a temporary solution to the shortcomings of the electronic waste recycling programs.
"Although the program needs to be overhauled, the new law will bring relief to electronics recycling programs that would've been forced to shut down," according to state Rep. Emily McAsey, a sponsor of the bill, reports the Journal Star.
The bill hopes to shift recycling costs away from consumers and local governments to electronic manufacturers. Last year, the state faced the problem in which manufacturers stopped paying for their recycling once they reached their goal halfway. As soon as they met their requirement, they would stop paying recycling companies. The new legislation hopes to mitigate this.
