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manufacturers always have the option of raising the cost of their goods to pay for this additional responsibility that we might be imposing on them. From everything she has researched and heard, Hawai‘i already as a small state might be challenged in being the first in doing EPR, although Maine passed a bill this year they are a small state, so it is interesting to see how that plays out. There have been efforts in states such as Washington and California. And the ongoing conversation has always been surrounding the idea that it would be a lot easier for Hawaii to follow the larger states and kind of piggyback on those efforts. Because a lot of the work on the manufacturer and producer side would be the same in each state. They would not have to create a different system in each state. Some of these efforts would be joint and so the ideaof doing it just at the County level, she wasn’t sure if the idea was the County should pass legislation to have a County EPR. From her understanding it probably wouldn’t be feasible to do it at such a small scale. You are basically looking at putting a requirement for just Hawai‘i County on multinational manufacturers. Their response would be questionable, and it would be a lot for the County to have oversight and manage, and require resources. Chair Adams said they were going with the idea of it being a State program, but also recognizing that being on a Neighbor Island, the costs are even higher to incorporate us. It isn’t just a state program or something run out of Honolulu, which is kind of where the e-waste has devolved to. It’s yeah, you can manage it for a big city, but the rest of us are kind of bits and pieces, and funding is hurting. It was in the context of it being a State program, and what was involved, and also with the difficulty of our spread-out County. Rep. Lowen agreed. Rep. Lowen said she was planning to reintroduce legislation in the 2022 session. It will be interesting to see the work that has been done and the conversation that has been done in the interim and in other states, and the effort that was made last year. To backtrack, when she introduced HB 1316 in the 2021 session, we had this plastic waste working group with different legislators from a bunch of different states. And we came up with the idea that regardless of how many bills we thought had a real chance of passing, we were going to get as many legislators and as many states as possible to introduce EPR bills, just to elevate this conversation nationally and to put manufacturers and producers on notice that this is a problem that we are not going to allow to be swept under the rug, essentially. She feels that we had a lot of success with that and there has been a lot of elevated conversation on this topic, so there are some new approaches going into next session. We do plan to reintroduce the bill and we are working on other bills, she said. The Department of Health’s testimony on HB 1316 is we should do a study first, that was the recommendation of the Plastic Source Reduction Working Group as well. She is not sure that a study will reveal any earth-shattering revelations of which she is unaware, but sometimes it will be important to study the economics of it. And sometimes, if there are people who oppose this kind of legislation, one of their rallying cries is, we should study it first. So to move forward with that would at least take it off the table. We could say, we have done the study and looked at it. That’s what happened with our bill last year. She introduced the original sweeping EPR program that didn’t have resounding support either in testimony or among even her EEP committee members. So the bill was amended to take it down to a study, and then added in the different measures, which were kind of new proposals, which were to do a “by request only” law statewide, which is what the City and 6