Dive summary:
- The Ontario Electronic Stewardship has introduced a new way to apply recycling fees, which would attempt to make the fees more equitable, more pliable to the product and make them keep up with yearly cost standards.
- Currently, set eco fees are collected from manufactures, retailers and distributors based on the amount of products they sell each month, but that method has quickly put the program into debt.
- Under the new system, the fees for some items would increase while others would decrease, most hovering around a few dollars; the one exception is the fee leap for large screen TVs, now up to $39.50 for TVs larger than 30 inches.
From the article:
Last year OES collected about $58 million in fees and spent $83 million on recycling and refurbishing, intentionally running a deficit to eat up an existing surplus. The new funding model was designed to be based primarily on the actual cost of processing used electronics, and will be updated each year based on the previous year's costs. Formerly, fees were based on estimate.
Under the new model, fees for some items decrease, while fees for other items increase. Many of the fees are a few dollars or less.
A controversial point has been the significantly higher fee for large-screen display devices like televisions. ...
