| To combat growing environmental and resource-related problems from leftover paint, the Paint Product Stewardship Initiative established a paint stewardship program in Oregon. Its task was to increase paint collection infrastructure, provide opportunities for reuse and recycling, and create outreach campaigns to reduce the generation of excess paint. The goal of this study was to explore the design and implementation of the Oregon program to move consumers up the waste hierarchy of reduction, reuse, recycling, energy recovery, and disposal, and to describe the program's obstacles, opportunities, and decisions with respect to the waste hierarchy. The methods of analysis included content analysis of program documents, a series of interviews with program personnel, and analysis of available program paint volume data. The results indicate that the main focus for the first year of the Oregon program was collection infrastructure for recycling (49 percent of paint collected was recycled), energy recovery (27 percent processed for energy recovery), and disposal (21 percent sent for disposal), with less emphasis on waste reduction and paint reuse (3 percent). Both existing and new infrastructure was leveraged to increase recycling, energy recovery, and disposal, and the emphasis of education and outreach materials was also on these lower tiers. To more efficiently encourage reliance on the most-preferred management methods in the waste hierarchy, the primary recommendation is for the program to articulate explicit goals related to paint volume or other indicators for each tier of the hierarchy, and then implement the specific recommendations to support these stated objectives. |
