If you thought forcing restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus was an intrusion by the nanny state, get ready for the Mary F'in Poppins of regulations: To prepare consumers and businesses for the arrival of a 2015 law that will ban the disposal of electronics in the trash, New York state is forcing all electronics manufacturers to take back and recycle your old electronics.
It's all part of a larger effort, happening concurrently in almost two dozen other states, to bring U.S. law in line with the European standard of "cradle to cradle design." In this philosophy, the components of products are completely recycled rather than extracted, used, and then thrown away.
By its third year the program will be taking back almost 100 million pounds of e-waste, says a spokesperson for the program.
