Kitsap County's Household Hazardous Waste Facility is one of the last local waste facilities in Washington to collect latex paint. And we get a lot of it!
Since 2012, we have received more than 150,000 gallons of latex paint. We were able to give more than 20,000 gallons of good-quality paint back to people in our community, but the rest of it was landfilled by our vendor.
It is expensive to collect latex paint and it is not actually hazardous, but we collect it because we don't like the alternatives:
- Telling families who just bought a new home full of paint that they have to dry out 30 gallons
- Telling grieving people who are cleaning out their deceased parent’s homes they have to dry out 75 gallons that had been saved up over the years
- People throwing wet paint into the trash, which in turn goes all over the roads, waters, waste facilities, and garbage haulers' trucks
- Illegally dumping
The new paint stewardship program changes everything!
The program makes paint manufacturers responsible for collecting and recycling their products instead of taxpayers and local governments. This is called the "product stewardship" model.
Under the new program, customers who buy architectural paint (latex, oil, or stains) at the store will pay a small recycling fee. Then they can simply return any leftover paint to a free collection site.
The paint manufacturing industry will appoint a stewardship organization to manage the program. The stewardship organization must have the program in place by November 30, 2020. Program designers expect that the stewardship organization will recycle more than 1.3 million gallons of paint annually.
Kitsap County Solid Waste Division will help the stewardship organization promote this program in our community.
