SB5174 – Making manufacturers responsible for recycling or reusing wind turbine blades. (Dead)
Prime Sponsor – Senator Jeff Wilson (R; 19th District; Northwest WA) (Co-sponsors Rolfes-D, Wagoner-R, Das-D, Claire Wilson-D, and Hunt-D)
Current status – Had a hearing in the Senate Committee on Environment, Energy and Technology January 27th. Replaced by a substitute and passed out of committee February 3rd; referred to Ways and Means. Had a hearing there on February 16th; passed out of Ways and Means February 18th. Referred to Rules, and placed in the “X” file March 17th.
Next step would be – Dead bill.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
Comments –
According to a recent Bloomberg Green article 85% of the steel, copper, electronics, and gearing in the turbines themselves can be recycled or reused, but the fiberglass blades “can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed.” (One company presses them into pellets and uses them in fiber board.) They’re a tiny part of the state’s waste stream; the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that all blade waste through 2050 will equal roughly .015% of all the waste going to landfills in 2015 alone. It isn’t at all clear that the life-cycle carbon footprint of recycling them won’t be larger than just landfilling them. Perhaps the bill is intended to create business for some company or organization, or make wind projects more expensive, but the time, energy, and money it will take to do this might will be better spent on many other kinds of waste that we could actually recycle or reuse effectively, or on other kinds of climate action projects altogether…
The bill’s deadline for submitting a plan and the deadline for having an approved plan in order to sell blades are the same, and there’s no timeline for Ecology’s review of plans, so in practice, plans would probably have to be submitted well before the deadline for doing that. The bill says manufacturers must have an approved plan by July 2023, and it says “manufacturers shall implement the plan”, but it doesn’t seem to actually specify a date by which they must implement it. (Maybe a window for that is implied in the requirement for a report on implementation by July 1, 2024.)
Summary –
Substitute –
The substitute requires manufacturers to designate a stewardship organization to carry out their obligations rather than making that an option. It makes recovering a fee to cover administrative expenses a requirement rather than an option, and calculates a manufacturer’s share of the fee on the basis of its average sales in the state over the last three years, rather than the most recent year.
Original bill –
The bill requires the Department of Ecology to develop guidance for manufacturers in developing and implementing a self-directed program and plans for the convenient, safe, and environmentally sound takeback and recycling of blades, their components and materials by January 1st, 2023. The responsibility for this falls on the owners of the brand names that the blades are sold under, on companies that import blades, or on retailers selling imported blades who choose to register as a manufacturer for those. Manufacturers may designate a stewardship organization to fulfill their obligations under the act.
Manufacturers or their organizations must submit a stewardship plan by July 1, 2023 (or thirty days after they sell their first blade in the state) describing how they will:
1. Adequately fund the costs of collection, management, and recycling of blades sold in or into Washington, including a mechanism that ensures they can be delivered to takeback locations without cost to the last owner or holder;
2. Accept all of these wind blades after the effective date of this section;
3. Provide for takeback of the blades at locations as convenient as reasonably practicable within the region in which they were used, and to include an explanation for the lack of such a location if one doesn’t exist);
4. Identify how relevant stakeholders will receive the information required to properly dismantle, transport, and treat end of life blades in a manner consistent with the bill’s objectives; and,
5. Establish performance goals, including one for reusing and recycling of at least 85% percent by weight of the collected wind blades.
Plans must be reviewed and approved by the department, and periodically updated. Starting July 1st 2023, manufacturers must have an approved plan to sell blades in the state; after a written warning, they can be fined up to $10,000 for each sale without one. The manufacturer or its designated stewardship organization must submit an annual report to the department documenting the implementation of the plan and assessing its achievement of the bill’s goals. The department is to collect fees from each manufacturer, in proportion to its percentage of the sales of blades in the state, to cover the costs of administering the program.
Instead of preparing and implementing a stewardship plan, a manufacturer may participate in a national program for the convenient, safe, and environmentally sound takeback and recycling of wind turbine blades and their components and materials, if that’s substantially equivalent to the intent of Washington’s program. (As far as I know, such a program does not exist.)