Senator Birkholz asked and was granted unanimous consent to make a statement and moved that the statement be printed in the Journal.
Senator Birkholz’s statement is as follows:
My bill in this two-bill package, Senate Bill 898, is a bill that will help establish a manufacturer-driven—I want to emphasize that—manufacturer-driven program to provide for the recycling of certain consumer computer electronic products. This is a take-back program, and it was actually brought to us by these leading manufacturers. It was brought to us, the Michigan Senate, and asked would we do this by people like Hewlett Packard, Dell, Apple, other leading manufacturers of consumer electronic equipment. They asked for a partnership, a public-private partnership, with government because they do not want what we all know can be very contaminated items to go into landfills or to be thrown by the wayside of roads or other places throughout the state of Michigan.
This is a public-private partnership, and it was driven by the manufacturing community. Members have letters from some of those large manufacturers on their desks. The bill that I have that is before you now requires the registration of recyclers of the covered electronic devices. It will require the department to enforce these rules, and it sets up a violation procedure so that it can be monitored. Any of you that saw “60 Minutes” Sunday night, we can make sure that none of this stuff will end up in foreign countries with little children taking out contaminated items from computers.
I would urge the adoption of this bill. The amendment before us sunsets the fees paid by the recyclers in 2015, so that the Legislature can go back and review the success of the program. It does implement a two-year incremental review of the adequacy of the fees.
Again, I would encourage the adoption of the amendment and the adoption of the bill to establish a public-private partnership to keep contaminated items out of the hands of especially children, but anyone so they are not exposed to those.