An electronics recycling law in Michigan has helped, but strengthening that law while expanding services and education could further boost recycling rates across the state.
That was among the key points of a recent Spark podcast, which is hosted by Wisconsin-based ITAD company Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations. Host Casey Hines, who’s also a sales executive with Dynamic, spoke with Steve Noble, electronics recycling specialist at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE); and Noelle Behling, communication and education coordinator for Emmet County.
Michigan’s electronics takeback law requires manufacturers to register the brands they sell in the state and set up takeback programs, with a target of 75% of e-scrap getting recycled rather than landfilled.
But the law doesn’t have enough teeth to create wide-scale participation, Noble said. Rural residents in the northern part of the state tend to have access to fewer collection sites, leaving them sometimes reliant upon once-yearly pickup events.
“But I would say from a statewide perspective, there is strong interest in having collection services,” said Noble, citing more participation in Detroit and other metro areas in the southern portion of the state. “As you get farther north in the rural areas, you run into higher expenses and higher costs to get the same amount of material. So the cost is a challenge.”
EGLE grants help offset some of that cost, but data concerns continue to keep some residents from disposing of items, he said. So convincing residents that recycling is secure remains a challenge. Both from that education standpoint and as a way to increase reach, he said getting more municipal partners would help improve participation across the state’s 83 counties.
Emmet County, in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron, runs more than a dozen permanent collection sites. Behling said grassroots efforts, including local advertising and meeting people in the community, has helped get more devices out of homes there; the county collected about 88,000 pounds of items in 2019 but had remained in six figures since the COVID-19 pandemic.
She said what works has been “the empathetic message, like saying, ‘Yes, it’s confusing. Yes, it’s hard to find information. And here’s what we can do to help you find the right location and the right strategy to remove those items from your home safely,’ ” she said.
Continuing to stress the environmental and safety benefits of keeping devices and batteries out of landfills has helped change minds, she said. So has getting creative; in one case, the county let a local high school robotics team retrieve electronics from the curb to incorporate into students’ projects.
“That’s what I love about our small community, is that we can have those relationships and these ideas can come to fruition,” Behling said.
To bring higher recycling rates to fruition, Noble said the state has encouraged local recyclers to do more pickups in rural areas that may not have high volumes of electronics. This has encouraged more collection, he said, because the municipalities don’t have to store items for months at a time and are more likely to run collection events.
Such convenience should help make recycling second nature to would-be hoarders, he said.
“We’re only going to see the amount of electronic stuff grow because we’re turning into an electronic world,” he said. “Collection once a year, I don’t see that being accessible to people because they then have to go 364 more days to find that access again.”
Michigan has a few other pieces of legislation in the works as leaders look to boost the statewide recycling rate to 30% by 2029. An extended producer responsibility law pertaining to packaging was introduced in Michigan but hasn’t yet passed. Legislators are also weighing revisions to the state’s bottle deposit law to make it easier to get deposits back.
