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Associated Press via Forbes, 6/9/09. The Wisconsin Senate has approved (23-10) a bill that would require electronics manufacturers to arrange for recycling of their products.Under Wisconsin's bill, dumping e-waste in landfills would be banned. Manufacturers would have to arrange to recycle 80 percent of the total weight of products they sold in the state in a given year. They also would have to pay up to $5,000 annually to register with state environmental officials.

Text of the pending Wisconsin e-waste law. This bill passed the WI Senate and arrived in the Assembly Tuesday, 6/16/09. Would require manufacturers of select consumer electronics (computers, printers and video display devices, such as TVs or monitors) to collect and recycle 80 percent of the weight of sold devices beginning in September. Beginning in February 2010, retailers can't sell electronics made by manufacturers that are not registered with WDNR. Manufacturers failing to meet their targets would be subject to a shortfall fee after 2010. Those who exceed their goals may be eligible for recycling credits. (Summary of bill taken from related article in GreenerComputing, 6/16/09.)

Headlines abound with stories of branded technology being fished out of rivers and landfills in developing nations leaking toxic metals into the water supply. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates roughly 400,000 tons of e-waste goes to recyclers every year, and that up to 80 percent of the materials sorted for recycling end up in operations in China, India, Southeast Asia and West Africa where it is disassembled and burned or dumped. But it doesn't have to be that way, declares Mark Newton, the senior manager of environmental sustainability at Dell Computers, the computer manufacturing giant based in Round Rock, Texas.