Enforce Free Battery+ Recycling in MA

Petition addressed to: Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection

This is a petition for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection to disallow companies to collect fees for recycling batteries and small electronic devices.

Staples recently changed their battery recycling program and now instead of issuing reward points for bringing them in, they are requesting you pay a $2.99 fee. https://www.the-sun.com/money/16334470/staples-electronic-recycling-fee-new-batteries-printers/ (The article also says that they started charging $9.99 to recycle printers and other devices, and increased the fee to recycle monitors to $29.00.)

Some states don't allow them to request these fee, but Massachusetts does.

According to this Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/Staples/comments/1t2s0ej/psa_staples_no_longer_recycles_batteries_for_free/), if you buy batteries at the same time, the fee is waived. But as many people say, and I experienced as well a few weeks ago at the Staples in Downtown Boston*, nobody in the store tells you that. Even the news article doesn't mention it.

Even so, forcing you to buy a battery when you might not need one also means that less people will recycle batteries.

Sure, there are other recycling centers, but for me, none that I can get to easily, and the same could be true for many others.

(*I am a NH resident, on the MA-NH border, but my business is registered in MA, and my work and friends are there. So this is a petition for the Massachusetts, which can serve as example to New Hampshire which already has less stringent environmental protections.)