Recycling
Senate Bill 5284, introduced by Sen. Liz Lovelett, D-Anacortes, will create a master plan and network for dealing with recyclables in Washington, to launch in 2029 or 2030. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate passed the bill, mostly along party lines.
The bill will establish a single statewide list of recyclables to reduce confusion on what to put in recycling bins. Every home with curbside garbage pickup will also get curbside service for recyclables, adding a half-million households to those receiving recycling service. Eleven of Washington’s 39 counties currently do not offer curbside recycling.
“The disparity of what is available across Washington state is pretty jarring,” Lovelett said at a Jan. 28 hearing before the Senate Energy & Environmental committee.
The bill also requires the manufacturers and providers of recyclable materials — plastics, cardboard, glass and some metals — to pay for their environmental impact. The companies would be required to form a statewide nonprofit entity called a “Producer Responsibility Organization,” which will assess annual payments from members based on the amount of recyclable materials each produces. The organization will then reimburse recycling pickup companies and local governments starting in 2030, with the idea that the companies and governments will pass the savings to their customers. The bill stipulates reimbursement rates of 50% in 2030, 75% in 2031 and 90% in 2032 and in each subsequent year.
When the House passed the bill on April 14, Rep. Liz Berry, D-Seattle and Lovelett’s partner in shepherding the bill through the Legislature, said: “Our state is being flooded with plastics. This bill turns off that tap.”
However, Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy, the GOP House leader on environmental issues, countered: “The people who are intended to pay for this big new recycling regime will pass the costs on to the consumers.”
Help for farmers
Farmers are supposed to be exempt from the gasoline and fuel surcharges created by the state’s cap-and-invest program, in which carbon-producing industries bid on allowances on emissions from their smokestacks. Oil refineries pass the costs of bidding on these allowances on to purchasers of gasoline and other fuels at the pump.
But the actual mechanics of tracking which fuels go to farming are complex. House Bill 1912, introduced by Rep Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, seeks to make it easier for farmers to get these reimbursements.
It can be difficult for farmers to get refunds for these charges because gasoline can travel multiple paths from refineries to farms. If a wholesale gasoline distributor ships fuel directly to a farm, that makes tracking easy. Other times, fuel goes through one or more middlemen before it reaches a farm, which adds to the complexity of tracking for the surcharge exemptions.
Big farms have accounting staffs to track complex supply chains. Smaller family farms don’t have that regulatory expertise. Sixty-seven percent of Washington’s roughly 32,000 farms are small.
Meanwhile, most farmers don’t buy directly from refineries or wholesale distributors, so farmers aren’t always getting the promised exemptions.
Small farms often buy their gasoline from retail filling stations. A rural gas station usually does not have the paperwork or trained employees needed to track their sales of farming vs. non-farming gasoline.
Dent’s bill calls for fuel distributors to voluntarily tell the state ecology department where exempt fuel is available for farmers. By Oct. 1, the ecology department must have a website set up with those locations, plus information on how to get surcharge refunds.
Both the House and Senate almost unanimously passed the bill. The House approved some Senate tweaks on Thursday.
But the Washington Farm Bureau, a major critic of cap-and-invest’s effects on farmers, is still not happy. At an April 5 hearing before the Senate Ways & Means Committee, Bre Elsey, representing the farm bureau, said the bill does not do enough to address the confusion surrounding obtaining fuel exemptions. Additionally, she noted that last year’s $30 million appropriations to help farmers to get reimbursed on paying surcharges has been reduced to $3 million this year, which she argued is insufficient.
Up-to-date data
Washington’s cap-and-invest system on carbon pollution became effective on Jan. 1, 2023. While touted as a revenue bonanza for numerous state environmental, transportation and health projects, the main thrust of the cap-and-invest program is to cut carbon emissions from vehicles and smokestack industries. The program requires polluting industries to bid for allowances on how much carbon they can emit. These industries are encouraged to trim their emissions over the next few decades with the ability to sell or trade their carbon allowances to someone else.
A Washington Department of Ecology report measured the state’s carbon dioxide emissions at 99.57 million tons in 2018. A 2008 state law calls for overall emissions to be reduced to 50 million tons by 2030, 27 million by 2040 and 5 million by 2050.
The problem is that no one knows how much carbon has been trimmed in Washington in the two years and four months that the cap-and-invest program has been in effect. The last Ecology department report — dated January 2025 — includes carbon emission figures only up to 2021, two years before the cap-and-invest program went into effect.
Under Senate Bill 5036, set to take effect Dec. 31, 2026, the state must provide annual reports on carbon emissions for the most recent year that the data is available. The House unanimously passed this bill. The Senate passed it 30-19.
Fusion power
Nuclear fusion reactors are in an experimental stage. They are touted as a carbon-free power source.
House Bill 1018 allows fusion projects to approach either the state government or appropriate county government for permission to build on a piece of land. That would give fusion projects the same options that solar and wind-turbine ventures have in picking their approving authority.
The state pathway in Washington is the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, a committee of representatives from several state government departments. EFSEC makes recommendations to the governor, who makes the final decisions.
The statewide council, which permits solar- and wind-power projects, has had an effect on Washington’s green-energy industry. Most companies that located solar and wind projects in Washington chose the state because it is less likely to be stopped by local opposition.
The two chambers passed the bill earlier this month.
Puget Sound has five nuclear-fusion-related ventures. These are Helion, which is trying to provide fusion power to Microsoft by 2028; Zap Energy and Avalanche, which are also working on fusion reactors; and Kyoto Fusioneering and ExoFusion, which are developing fusion-related technologies.
Avalanche plans to create a testing center for fusion technology — dubbed FusionWERX — in the Tri-Cities area, according to Geekwire. While the Tri-Cities area has been hostile to wind power, it is extremely pro-nuclear.
Helion and a separate project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have achieved fusion reactions that release more energy than what went into the reactor, which is the threshold needed to make fusion power practical.
At a Jan. 20 committee hearing on the bill, Helion representative Tom Bugert was asked for a specific year when fusion power would be commercially practical. He did not answer with a specific year, but said “It’s right around the corner.” Helion supports the bill.
”I believe fusion energy is the future of clean energy. … This bill will attract cutting-edge research,” said Rep. Clyde Shavers, D-Clinton, the bill’s sponsor, at the same hearing.
Clean Fuels Program
The legislature also tightened the goals of the Clean Fuels Program, a 2021 law that required that each unit of transportation fuel (for example, a gallon of gasoline) in 2038 must lower the level of greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below the levels recorded in 2017.
House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle and former longtime Democratic environmental legislative leader, introduced House Bill 1409, which changes that goal to reducing carbon contents to 45% below 2017 levels. That goal can be adjusted if some outside factors change the overall picture in the interim.
In earlier hearings, supporters — mostly environmental interests — argued the 45% target will trim more greenhouse gases, and encourage people to switch to electric vehicles. Business interests, led by the Western States Petroleum Association and the Association of Washington Business, opposed the bill, arguing it would increase the costs of gasoline and other fuels.
Most House and Senate Democrats voted for the bill, while Republicans overwhelmingly opposed it. It was sent to the governor’s desk Wednesday.
Correction April 29, 2025: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated what year of data must be included on the annual carbon emissions report. This article has been corrected.
