The middle R in the zero-waste triumvirate usually gets the least attention, but advocates and experts hope renewed legislative focus on reuse will bring the concept back to the forefront of the nation’s collective consciousness.
A few generations ago, reusing items was as natural an activity as breathing or eating. Milkmen collected bottles that were reused a few dozen times, and pants were stitched up until another sew job became impossible.
But the advent of TV dinners and fast food sparked a wave of single-use items that flooded the waste stream. A few years later, the consumer electronics boom led to a surge in demand for critical minerals, as well as a glut of quickly obsolete items that people often didn’t know how to repair or, in some cases, couldn’t if they wanted to.
With brands incorporating refresh cycles into their products’ lifespans, and the boom in data centers that can generate up to 25 tons of e-scrap when decommissioned, there will be no slowdown in the volume of discarded electronics. Public Interest Research Group estimates Americans generate nearly 7 million tons of e-waste a year, no more than a quarter of which gets recycled or reused, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
That leaves a lot of room for improvement.
“Reuse is more or less a startup,” said Anja Brandon of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group that’s pushed reuse as part of many of its initiatives. “We used to have a developed reuse economy, but over time we devoted funding and time to single-use items and recycling.”
Legislative help on the horizon
Seven states have enacted extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws for packaging, which require manufacturers and brand owners to in some way fund the lifecycles of their products, including collection, recycling and reuse.
California’s SB 54, which officially took effect earlier this year, is the first of those laws to contain a specific clause for reuse. According to the Circular Action Alliance (CAA), which is the producer responsibility organization (PRO) in California that will manage compliance-related matters on behalf of companies, material conversion there must be at 2% reuse or refill by 2027, 4% by 2030 and 10% by 2032 (the law calls for reuse, refill or elimination by the last date).
More specifically, that 10% target is part of an overall 25% source reduction goal requiring a decrease in the total weight and number of plastic components in covered packaging. StopWaste Executive Director Timothy Burroughs, who served a three-year term on the SB 54 advisory board, said achieving the goals in the legislation won’t be possible without leaning more on reuse.
“At StopWaste, we see reuse as perhaps the most important pillar to creating a more circular economy,” said Burroughs, whose organization serves as the waste management authority for Alameda County in California. “The majority of the impacts caused by our consumption of disposables happen long before we throw items away … resource extraction, processing and transportation.”
Those percentages pertain to single-use plastic packaging, but SB 54 could nonetheless offer guidance in other states across material types.
“As each state’s statutory framework is distinct, no single state provides a one-to-one roadmap for others, but California’s scale and scope position it to generate best practices and learnings that CAA expects to apply in other states where appropriate,” said Sylvia Lee, CAA’s reuse and refill director, who noted the challenges to creating a reuse infrastructure could make it cost-prohibitive without government help. With plastic, for example, “some producers have noted that even smaller shifts, like lightweighting or moving to alternative materials, typically take 1-3 years on their own before factoring in the reverse logistics that reusable packaging required.”
Head north for answers
CAA also serves as the PRO in Oregon, where the Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act has been in place since July 2025.
That state has a dedicated program, Material Impact Reduction and Reuse (MIRROR), which funnels funds collected by CAA to pay for reuse initiatives. That state’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) disperses that money for projects that promote the reuse and/or reduction of packaging, paper and food serviceware.
“It’s a tangible first step,” said Dan Leif, policy implementation director at The Recycling Partnership, which advocates for recycling and reuse initiatives. “That’s a level of producer funding geared toward reuse in other upstream initiatives.”
Among the projects targeted for grant funding is Reuse Deschutes in and around Bend. That project would see the city’s food cart lots convert from single-use serviceware to reusable items that could be cleaned at a central washing operation.
“We have 32 food carts in the county. One of the unique challenges is that most of them serve everything in single-use containers,” said Kavi Chokshi, Rethink Waste program manager at the Environment Center, the nonprofit leading the project. “We can reduce trash pickup costs, bringing the cost of washing items on par with using single-service items.”
A similar reuse program through Newburg, Oregon-based Revino has seen that company supply Brooks Winery with washed wine bottles processed through a central facility in McMinnville. Revino recently secured a $4.8 million grant from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) to establish a washing hub in Lompoc, California, that can process 10 million glass bottles a year by the end of 2027.
“We know recycling alone will not mitigate climate change. We must invest in reuse systems,” said Revino co-founder Adam Rack.
Rocky road to e-scrap legislation
EPR legislation varies among the 23 states, along with the District of Columbia, that have e-waste-related laws on the books. Vermont and Colorado are among the states with battery EPR laws, both of which ban batteries from landfills and require manufacturers to fund collection and recycling efforts.
Nineteen states and DC have banned electronics from their landfills. With recycling numbers remaining low, that leaves a lot of electronics ripe for reuse that are illegally dumped, discarded or sitting in junk drawers for the next several years.
Several states have enacted right-to-repair laws that force manufacturers to provide diagnostic and repair documentation and parts publicly; California and New York are among nine states with laws specifically addressing consumer electronics, said Katie Reilly, vice president of environmental affairs and industry sustainability for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). While many EPR laws focus more on recycling than reuse, she said the support they provide to enable the repair of items is needed.
But building out a broader repair and reuse infrastructure comes at an initial cost that makes some people wary. Chokshi, for one, said contributions from participants can help build and sustain reuse programs, as can fines assessed for noncompliance.
Only through the force of government can the full weight of these programs be felt, according to Nick Nesbitt, who founded Mapleview Energy in Ontario two years ago. His company reuses end-of-life EV batteries for solar energy storage.
“We need way better access to funding. Early-stage hardware companies are super difficult to build,” he said. “I don’t think the government should just give handouts, but it should help businesses that are delivering on projects or have proven that they can.”
EPR legislation is increasingly doing just that. Aside from California’s specific targets, Lee said Oregon’s law requires CAA to spend around 10% of its budget on the DEQ reuse fund, while Washington’s law requires CAA to spend at least $5 million on reuse and Colorado is requiring CAA to set reuse targets as part of its second EPR program plan.
Enforceability also matters, Leif said. SB 54 allows CalRecycle to levy fines and otherwise enforce compliance on reuse. That could include a noncompliant manufacturer losing the ability to do business in the state.
“These laws truly do provide that enforcement teeth,” he said.
Taking matters into their own hands
Many of CTA’s 1,000-plus members manage their own reuse and refurbishment programs, Reilly said, directly or through service providers. That group launched a Consumer Technology Circularity Initiative two years ago that encourages more electronic item reuse. Founding members include Lenovo, which increased the use of recycled plastic in its products, and Panasonic, which pledged to maximize product life and minimize material use.
Automation, AI-driven processes and product design advances will only bolster the reuse and repair industry, she said.
“Electronic devices have a robust reuse market and a mature reuse and refurbishment industry here in the US,” Reilly said. “The reuse and repair industry for electronics is robust and positioned to continue to grow due to increasing consumer and industrial demand — without government intervention.”
Working with brands and manufacturers as a PRO, Lee said the CAA has used continual feedback to guide its actions. To scale the infrastructure up will take time, she said, and may require government intervention for standardization.
Brandon agrees, saying legislation may be necessary to reverse engineer a half-century of single-use consumption.
“We need coordination. Imagine if Coke and Pepsi and Amazon all had to use different recycling locations. That would be maddening,” she said. “We don’t have to overengineer this. Reusables need to be built to last and work to scale, not survive a nuclear apocalypse.”
As EPR laws mature and businesses continue to adapt, opportunities should emerge that make reuse a more viable option, Leif said.
“It’s really notable that all of these laws, in their own way, have an emphasis on reuse and materials management,” he said. “It’s not like reuse infrastructure will develop overnight, but because there’s this reliable source of funding and time to build out an ecosystem … we are going to see improvement over time.
“There’s an industrywide understanding that reuse makes a lot of sense. With reuse, it’s going to be that sense of incremental progress, taking one step at a time to enhance a really complicated system.”
