Oregon’s House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would bring significant changes to the state’s law for electronics collection and processing.
The House on March 22 passed House Bill 3220 in a vote of 56 in favor and 4 excused and not voting. The legislation is now in a Senate committee.
The bill makes a number of important changes to the Oregon E-Cycles program, a 14-year-old program that currently covers computers, TVs, monitors, printers, keyboards and mice.
HB 3220 adds to the program fax machines, VCRs, portable digital music players, DVD players and recorders, video game consoles, digital converter boxes, cable and satellite receivers, scanners, small-scale servers, routers and modems.
In addition to a producer responsibility organization (PRO) representing larger electronics brands, Oregon currently has a state contractor program that carries out the collection and recycling responsibilities on behalf of many OEMs. The bill eliminates the state contractor program but allows for multiple PROs.
Additionally, HB 3220 sets new standards for the locations of collections sites. Currently, the law requires at least one collection site in each county and one site for each city of 10,000 or more residents. The legislation will change the requirement to the following: Ensuring that 95% of residents are within 15 miles of a collection site, that there is one site in each county and that each city provides a minimum number of sites according to its population.
The bill also requires PROs to sign contracts with any permitted transfer station, landfill or materials recovery facility that wants to become an Oregon E-Cycles collection site.
Based on the population requirements in the bill, in the city of Portland, which has nearly 648,000 residents and is the state’s largest city, the PROs would need to sign contracts to ensure there are at least 10 sites plus one site for every 50,000 people over 200,000. That comes out to at least 18 collection sites total.
According to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) site map, there are currently 16 sites inside Portland city limits.
The bill includes a number of other changes, many of which go into effect Jan. 1, 2026.
Oregon DEQ held a series of five public workshops and a number of small group meetings to develop, present and solicit feedback on concepts for the bill before it was introduced in February. DEQ hired the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI) to facilitate the stakeholder outreach.
DEQ laid out many of the concepts in the bill during a November workshop covered by E-Scrap News. At the time, they said they wanted to get general buy-in from stakeholders before the bill was introduced. The chief sponsor of the bill is Rep. Pam Marsh, a Democrat from southern Oregon.
In other Oregon news, lawmakers have advanced a right-to-repair bill that would require manufacturers to provide to independent repair shops and individual consumers the same tools, parts and information that they provide to authorized repair providers.
Senate Bill 542 has had two public hearings and three work sessions in the Senate Energy and Environment Committee. The committee on April 4 voted 3-2 to recommend passage of the bill, sending it to the Senate floor. The Association of Oregon Recyclers (AOR) is among the supporters of the legislation.
