During a workshop at this year’s E-Scrap Conference, the Recycled Materials Association (ReMA) sketched a packed advocacy agenda for its electronics division, centering on tariffs, batteries and barriers to reuse.
ReMA assistant vice president of sustainability Natalie Messer Betts said the association’s recent rebrand from ISRI was meant to help policymakers see recyclers as “sustainable, resilient and essential.”
Vice president of government relations and public policy Kristen Hildreth followed with an overview of ReMA’s four advocacy pillars for 2025: market access and economic growth, reasonable environmental frameworks, responsible governance and workforce readiness and innovation and investment. Trade and batteries both sit inside that framework, she said.
On the trade front, Hildreth said a well-connected contact in the White House recently advised the group to “buckle up,” since the current mix of tariffs and responses may define international trade for the next 10 or more years.
Battery-related issues took up much of the workshop, reflecting both their fire risk and their role in critical mineral recovery. Messer Betts said that while batteries are “an unprecedented safety risk to the industry when they’re placed in the wrong streams,” federal research shows that spent batteries are a far more efficient source of battery-grade metals than ore or brine.
On the policy side, Hildreth said a battery policy work group of ReMA members has spent more than a year developing principles for small and medium non-embedded battery programs and is now finishing a position paper on propulsion batteries.
For smaller cells, she said, ReMA supports producer funded stewardship systems, clear consumer education requirements and the ability of established recyclers to keep collecting batteries outside a stewardship program without being forced to surrender material, as long as they report basic performance data to the state.
The workshop closed with a panel on member-led projects inside the electronics division. Craig Boswell, president of HOBI International and chair of the ReMA reuse and refurbishment subcommittee, said remote device management locks are “the largest problem my business is facing,” because they strand tens of thousands of otherwise reusable devices each month when clients cannot or will not unlock them.
He said the subcommittee is using ReMA’s convening power to bring refurbishers, major manufacturers and software firms together to look for ways to reduce unnecessary loss of reusable equipment.
Electronics Value Recovery president Matthew Young, who leads an electronics specifications group, described a parallel effort to update ReMA’s long standing specs so they reflect the post Y49 Basel framework and the growing importance of reuse.
Young and Boswell both argued that tariffs, batteries and product design changes are arriving too quickly for individual firms to track alone and said the electronics division gives operators a forum to compare notes and feed real world concerns into ReMA’s lobbying work.
