Illinois bill increases annual amount electronics manufacturers must pay for recycling

A bill increasing the annual amount that manufacturers are required to pay to recycle electronics in Illinois has headed to Gov. Bruce Rauner, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune website.

Under the new law, manufacturers must recycle or reuse 49.6 million pounds of electronics annually, which was increased by roughly 13 million pounds from 36.2 million, the article reports. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency will assign specific amounts to each company according to the manufacturer’s sales in Illinois from prior years.

The Illinois House and Senate each unanimously passed House Bill 1455 in mid-May, according to the Chicago Tribune article. The bill is designed to be a short-term fix to get recycling centers to accept electronics again.

In 2014 when manufacturers reached their required goal before the end of the year, they stopped paying for recycling and the costs were pushed onto recycling companies and local governments, the article states. In response, a number of collection sites in Illinois closed or cut back on electronics recycling.

“This was obviously a crisis, which is why it got the attention it did” the article quotes Marta Keane, Will County recycling specialist, as saying.

The new bill also increases manufacturers' goals, requiring them to recycle 90 percent instead of 70 percent of their designated weight and prohibiting them from charging local governments for recycling, the Chicago Tribune reports.

“This is not a long-term solution,” Keane says in the article, adding that legislators and recyclers will return to the negotiating table later this year.

“We want to have permanent (recycling) sites that people can rely on, where electronics will get recycled but not on the government's dime,” the Chicago Tribune quotes Keane as saying.