The 2026 Electronics EPR Laws Redraw Who Counts as a Producer

"Is a cordless toothbrush covered electronics?" A client's product counsel asked me that in February, and she wasn't joking. I'll leave her employer out of it, since the product hadn't launched, but in California the answer has been yes since January 1, 2026, when SB 1215 folded battery-embedded products into the state's Covered Electronic Waste program. The test turns on whether a consumer can get the battery out with no more than commonly used household tools, which has nothing to do with what the device is for. That one clause pulled earbuds, smart watches, powered toys and bicycle shifters into a program designed around televisions. Most of the electronics EPR laws that moved in 2026 didn't add states to the map. They redrew the perimeter of the programs already on it, and the companies now inside that perimeter are mostly ones that have never filed an e-waste report.

So which products got pulled in, and in which states?

California's expansion is the widest. Since January the fee has run at 1.5 percent of retail price, capped at fifteen dollars a unit, collected by the retailer and remitted to the state tax authority rather than paid in by the manufacturer [per CalRecycle program guidance]. Manufacturers owe the paperwork instead: an annual notice telling California retailers which products are covered, brand and battery-chemistry labeling, and a first manufacturer report due July 1, 2027. (It also shows up as its own line on consumer receipts, which has already generated customer-service traffic for brands that never warned their channel.)

Oregon went a different direction on the same date. Its modernized program started January 1, 2026 under HB 3220, and DEQ's program page sets out two changes that matter more than the device list: producers now register with the state, report sales data, designate a producer responsibility organization and fund the program, and the convenience requirements got tighter. Still, the device list did grow. Scanners, DVD players, game consoles, converter boxes, routers, modems and small servers all came in, so a networking vendor that never sold a screen in Oregon has a registration obligation and a share of a collection network it has never used.

Vermont and Illinois both passed battery bills in the same season and got more coverage for it. Those operate on loose cells rather than the electronics programs, so keep them in a separate file. But the two regimes converge later, when a state decides a device with a sealed cell belongs to both, which is the collision underneath the 2026 lithium battery EPR laws.

We hit our pound target. Why is our exposure going up?

Because a weight standard measures performance against a goal, while the cost of running a collection network sits on a separate clock.

New York shows the shape of that. Each manufacturer's acceptance standard is the statewide recycling goal multiplied by its own market share, so the number moves with competitors' sales as well as your own. Miss it and a per-pound surcharge comes due; a waiver exists for manufacturers who can demonstrate best efforts, and failure to submit the surcharge carries a civil penalty of up to $1,000 a day. Registration for an individual acceptance program runs $5,000, and a $3,000 annual reporting fee rides along with the March 1 report [per New York DEC's manufacturer requirements].

The part that eats a budget sits elsewhere in that rulebook. A program runs continuously and may not stop accepting equipment once it has hit its standard. At least one reasonably convenient collection method has to exist in every county and every municipality of 10,000 or more residents, and where no free convenient option exists the manufacturer owes free pickup within 30 days of a request. A producer that hits its tonnage in March is still funding collection in December.

By the regulator's own account, the weight-target model underdelivers. New York's DEC has said that manufacturers were not absorbing all program costs as the statute intended, which pushed them onto recyclers, municipalities and consumers; bills to make producers cover the full cost regardless of target attainment have been introduced in Albany repeatedly since at least 2019. Minnesota produced a harder number, its collection peaking near forty million pounds a year and having lost roughly half of that by 2021, according to testimony filed with the Minnesota Legislature in 2025. A standard with a cheap shortfall fee attached prices the fee, and producers pay the fee. That is why the 2026 electronics EPR laws go after cost allocation instead of targets.

What's the first move if we might be newly covered?

Build a product list keyed to the statutory test rather than to your marketing categories. Scope determination is per product, and nobody inside a company owns it: engineering knows whether the cell is glued in, legal knows the statute, and the two documents have never met. In California the artifact that settles it is the annual notice to retailers, and the asymmetry runs against the producer, because a retailer must collect the fee even when no notice ever identified the product as covered. Get that wrong and your channel partners find your scope error through their own tax filings.

Then fix the calendar and the contracts. Oregon's registration and PRO declaration for the 2027 program year ran from October to December 2026, and those windows are annual and short. Private-label and brand-licensing deals deserve a look too, because the obligation follows the brand on the housing rather than the factory that built it. New York requires notice within 30 days when a brand is sold or a license transferred, a clause that sits unread until somebody's compliance team inherits a product line nobody registered.

What changes when a producer responsibility organization runs the program?

Your compliance filing turns into somebody else's contract. Under Oregon's model a producer registers, declares which PRO it belongs to, and pays into that organization's plan, while the plan itself, with its cost allocation and contractor list, is drafted by the PRO and approved by the agency. For the 2027 program year DEQ received exactly one plan, from MRM, and parts of it arrived redacted under trade-secret claims the agency had not yet ruled on when public comment opened in August 2026 [per DEQ's 2026 program page]. Producers are funding a cost structure they aren't allowed to read.

Permit work teaches the same lesson on a loop. In 2023 I sat through a Title V renewal where the client had filed a change as a minor modification, it tripped PSD review, and the project lost eight months nobody had budgeted. Nothing about the emissions had changed, only the paperwork classification. Scope reclassification, rather than a new numeric limit, produces the expensive surprise, and that is what the 2026 e-waste extended producer responsibility rules do to a producer whose device contains a cell the user can't remove.

If a PRO handles collection, does my downstream still matter?

Yes, and the federal end of it hasn't moved in twenty years. Used broken CRTs stay outside the definition of solid waste only if the handler meets the conditions in 40 CFR 261.39: storage in a building or a container closed to limit glass and fine particles, speculative accumulation limits, and labeling the rule spells out word for word.

Each container must be marked "Used cathode ray tube(s)-contains leaded glass" or "Leaded glass from televisions or computers," and must also state "Do not mix with other glass materials."

Export is where producers get hurt by a vendor's filing habits. A notification goes to EPA sixty days before the first shipment, the receiving country has to consent in writing, and the acknowledgment of consent travels with each load. States can be stricter and are drifting that way, with Ohio adopting its own version of the conditional exclusion effective January 16, 2026. If a processor ships leaded glass or plastic fines offshore on a thin notification, the paper trail still runs back through the generator.

So ask for the shredder and sorter line, not just the certificate. A Vecoplan grinder feeding a Tomra sorter yields different output fractions, and a different residual going to disposal, than a hand-disassembly shop that bales boards and puts the housings in a roll-off. Landfill diversion claims in an annual report get audited against that downstream, which is where zero-waste-to-landfill solutions become a mass balance somebody can check. I'd want twelve months of outbound weights by fraction before signing a PRO's processor list.

Where does this analysis stop holding?

At the state line, mostly. Roughly half the country has no electronics EPR laws at all, and a producer selling only into those states owes nothing beyond ordinary hazardous waste rules on its own retired gear. De minimis thresholds matter more than people expect: New York exempts manufacturers selling fewer than 1,000 units a year, and refurbishers. Thresholds written in units (not revenue) cut the wrong way for anyone shipping cheap high-volume accessories.

It doesn't port across the Atlantic either. The EU runs electronics obligations through Directive 2012/19/EU on six collection categories with their own targets and its own producer definition, including the importer-of-record treatment that catches US brands shipping direct to European consumers. Run a US coverage matrix against that directive and you get confident wrong answers.

And the market-share machinery underneath these programs rests on self-reported sales data of uneven quality. A standard calculated from everybody's filings is only as good as the worst filer, and neither the statutes nor the PROs can fix that. So exposure estimates for producer responsibility electronics programs hold best for large producers in covered states with clean sales records, and get loose fast for anyone selling through distributors into a dozen jurisdictions.

Disclosure: I consult on permitting, ESG and regulatory strategy for waste-to-energy and materials-recovery developers, and write here for Renewable Waste Energy.

Sources & Notes

• The fee rate, the cap, labeling duties and the 2027 report date come from CalRecycle's page on covered battery-embedded products.
• Oregon's start date, producer duties, registration windows and the redacted 2027 plan are documented on DEQ's E-Cycles 2026 page.
• The acceptance standard, surcharge, fees and convenience rule: New York DEC on covered electronic equipment manufacturer requirements.
• CRT storage, labeling and export conditions quoted above are the current text of 40 CFR 261.39, created by the 2006 rulemaking at 71 FR 42928.
• Minnesota's collection decline appears in March 2025 testimony to a Minnesota Senate committee, advocacy rather than an agency audit, so the peak figure is approximate.