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Newport Township activist Tom Kashatus has picked up an increasing number of televisions dumped along township roads and bemoaned Luzerne County’s inability to resume an electronics recycling program accepting them.
“Right now I’m stuck with about 50 or 60,” Kashatus recently told the county council’s legislative committee. “I just didn’t want my town looking like a junk pile with TVs scattered all over the place.”
The county did not offer its popular free electronics collections last year and won’t revive them in 2017 because it can’t find a cost-efficient way to recycle older, heavy televisions, said county Recycling Coordinator Beth DeNardi.
The culprit is the state’s Covered Device Recycling Act of 2010, or Act 108, she told the committee. The law rightfully said televisions must be recycled instead of going to landfills, but it created “more harm” by imposing a weight limit on old televisions that must be accepted by television manufacturers for recycling, she said.
Manufacturers must cover recycling equivalent to the weight of product they sold two years prior, she said. Televisions weigh less today, which means they meet their quotas too soon to satisfy the demand for disposal of older televisions, she said.
“This is killing us because every year electronics are becoming smaller and lighter. The televisions are the biggest problem,” said DeNardi, noting the county accepted more than 500,000 pounds of televisions in 2015.
She asked the committee to push state legislators to change the law, in part by revising the weight quota, so consumers, municipalities and counties won’t continue “suffering the effects of illegal dumping.”
DeNardi said she fields complaints “from all ends” about televisions discarded along county roadways.
In lieu of a countywide collection, DeNardi’s office has offered funding to local government entities to help offset the cost of holding their own electronic recycling events. Residents in six of the 76 municipalities had access to electronics collections last year, she said.
While some privately operated recycling operations will accept old televisions for a per-pound fee, DeNardi said the Salvation Army Family Store at 739 Sans Souci Parkway in Hanover Township is the only local organization she’s identified willing to take them for free.
Tony Connell, the store’s truck dispatcher, said the Hanover Township facility is limiting daily television drop-offs to five per customer because some municipalities attempted to bring in truckloads of televisions after the county ended its collection.
Connell estimated his store receives 100 to 200 televisions per week.
“It’s been nonstop for six to seven months,” he said.
The Salvation Army can accept the televisions because it has an agreement with a California company that picks them up for its own recycling program, he said.
“Without that agreement, we wouldn’t be able to accept them because we’d have to build three more warehouses to store all these TVs,” Connell said.
Councilman Harry Haas, who heads the legislative committee, said the matter will be among the issues raised at a yet-to-be-scheduled county roundtable session with state and federal officials. The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania also has identified amendments to the Covered Device Recycling Act in its priorities platform, he said.
Haas said he spotted five discarded television sets along a trail when he was biking in Lehigh County.
“It’s a statewide epidemic,” he told his council colleagues.