2021-08-25 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Rep. Lowen thanked the Commission for inviting her and started with a bill she introduced in 1 . This grew out of work that she has been doing with legislators in the 2021session, HB 1316 other states that work on environmental issues as well. When she introduced the bill, she knew it was unlikely to pass this session and establish an EPR program in the State of Hawai‘i because it’s a big change and there are a lot of unanswered questions about cost, and it would require additional staffing, and oversight from the Department of Health that we would need to fund. There’s a lot of questions, and a lot of times with big new ideas, there is a period of introducing a bill and educating the public and others at the Legislature about it before it gains enough support to be able to pass. Essentially, that was the main goal introducing the bill last session. EPR can be structured in different ways. The idea of EPR, to boil it down and sum it up, and simplify it, is just that producers should be responsible for end of life management for the waste that they produce. The bill that she introduced was related to packaging waste, which included plastic waste, but also things like cardboard, aluminum, glass, et cetera. But you could have an EPR regime for potentially any kind of product. It was mentioned earlier you could have an EPR for paint products and household hazardous waste products. You could have an EPR for a producer take-back program for prescription drugs or large household appliances, or all kinds of things. So it’s really the idea of a circular economy. This is as a concern that groups such as Zero Waste Hawai‘i Island often raised. An EPR program does have to be designed in such a way that you are also incentivizingsource reduction, because we all recognize with the waste stream the end solution has to do with source reduction of the waste that we produce and not just with making sure that more of it gets recycled, or that we have just operational waste management systems, which the County is struggling with right now, just to get it away from where people see it or experience it, which might still involve it going to the landfill, which is not an ultimate solution. There are different ways things that can work. We have an e-waste program already existing, and that is supposed to give funds to the County. It’s kind of an EPR regime where manufacturers pay fees to the State Department of Health and then those funds get distributed to the counties. With the EPR program, or at least the model we introduced, it’s more about holding the producers responsible for ensuring that certain percentages – and those percentages increase over time – of the waste that they are responsible for producing gets recycled or taken back. And the result of that could be that they come back and be responsible for setting up their own programs for waste reduction, including collection of recycling, which would take some of that off the hands of the County. Whether or not it’s structured to have a direct funding stream that goes to the County that the County gets to utilize, she is not quite sure. It would depend on how the policy is structured. She did meet with all the counties’ departments of environmental management and the Department of Health, and when we introduced it we did have support. But from the Department of Health we had more of a “we support the intent.” They were recommending that we do a study first to see what the cost would be, whether there would be end costs that would be pushed to consumers. The 1 HB 1316 HD1: https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/measure_indiv.aspx?billtype=HB&billnumber=1316&year=2021 5