Changing the way Oregonian's pay for recycling

From KLCC Studios, this is

Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dahn. For a long time now, most of us have embraced recycling and ensure that we use the proper bins for the proper items. In my house, it's green for trash and blue for recycling. And for a long time now, our municipalities charged us to take those items away to be recycled. But is that the way it really should be? After all, it's not cities and counties that produce the materials we need to recycle. In today's consumer ecosystem, most of the stuff that needs to be recycled comes from big e-commerce companies and their packaging. Today on the show, you'll meet representatives from an organization that is successfully challenging the status quo here in Oregon of who pays for recycling. And so far, they're winning in an effort to have producers of packaging pay to recycle their boxes, wrappings, and containers. That's next on Oregon on the Record. Bye. I think almost everyone would agree that our near universal acceptance and practice of recycling is a good thing. What used to go into the landfill now gets repurposed and reused, and that benefits the environment. But recycling is expensive, and for the most part, we as consumers pay the cost to our municipal recycling system. Today on the show, you'll hear from an organization who thinks there's a better way, and they're changing Oregon law on who pays for recycling. Dan Leaf, Director of Policy Implementation, and John Height, Senior Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, both with the Recycling Partnership. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us. Great to be

here. Yeah, great to be here.

Great. John, I'm just going to start with you. A very simple question is, tell folks, what is the Oregon Packaging Reuse Law?

Well, the full title is the Recycling Modernization Act. And it does not just focus on recycling. It focuses on essentially end of life for packaging. And that could be recycling. It could be reuse and refill. But the goal of the program is pretty simple. It's about fairness. It's about helping move costs of recycling from local governments who historically in Oregon have been front and center in recycling ensuring recyclables are picked up from folks' house and brought to a recycling center for a second run through the economic system. And it's taking a lot of those costs to collect and to do the sorting and to do the recycling and placing them back onto the companies who are putting those packages on the market in the first place.

Okay. Dan, maybe if you could explain to people why this is so important and talk about the fact of this is a rather fundamental shift, isn't it?

Yeah, so this type of legislation, it's called in parlance, extended producer responsibility. And as John noted, it's really a strategy to help bring those large companies that are using packaging and bringing that in. into the marketplace, having them share in the responsibility of managing that material and bringing new funding to really improve the statewide recycling system by doing things like creating a single Nice list of recyclables across the state. So it's a little bit more straightforward for residents. Also bringing