Eugenia Pan'kiv / Unsplash
Callie Babbitt has spent years studying what happens to electronics after people throw them away. As a sustainability professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, she has watched a promising industry try and fail, repeatedly, to grow beyond its local market. The reason, she says, is not technology. It isn't capital, either. It's the law. And there are 25 different versions of it.
"E-waste is governed by 25 different state laws, all slightly different," Babbitt recently told Quartz. "If you're a company trying to build a national business around recycling technology, every market is a different regulatory puzzle."
For the growing number of companies betting that AI and robotics can extract value from discarded electronics, the regulatory landscape is a veritable minefield.
Twenty-five states plus the District of Columbia have enacted some form of e-waste legislation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The remaining 25 states have nothing: no comprehensive electronics recycling programs, and no reporting requirements, according to Minnesota-based recycler Repowered. In those states, it's legal to throw a television or a laptop in the garbage. No one there is keeping score.
