SWANA Land of Lincoln Newsletter - End of Summer 2025 
President's Report
Time seems to go faster every year – how are we heading into (my favorite season) fall already?! This fall is a busy time for the SWANA Illinois Chapter - in September we are hosting Manager of Landfill Operations training, in October we are co-hosting the Illinois Circularity Conference with the Illinois Counties Solid Waste Management Association (ILCSWMA) and Illinois Recycling Foundation (IRF), and in November some of us will be heading to the first-ever rCon in Columbus, OH (the reinvention of Wastecon).
While the Board has been busy planning for this fall, our Young Professional (YP) liaison, Spencer LaBelle, has done a tremendous job bringing together YPs across and adjacent to our membership and growing their engagement to a consistent 20+ when they meet. Connecting with these YPs is invigorating for us as a Board and encouraging for the chapter and industry as a whole. I am excited to see how their energy and the experience of our more established members combine to bring impactful and timely opportunities to inform, educate, challenge, and innovate through future events.
Happy Fall, y’all – hope to see you at one of our events in the next couple months, and reach out to find out how you can get more involved with our chapter!
Christina Seibert
SWANA Illinois (Land of Lincoln) Chapter President
Calendar of Events
- SWANA Illinois Board of Directors Meeting: August 28
- MOLO Training: Sept. 16 - 18 (register today; details below!)
- SWANA Illinois Board of Directors Meeting: Sept. 25
- Illinois Circularity Conference: Oct. 14 & 15 (register today; details below!)
- rCon: Nov. 12 - 15, Columbus, OH (register today; event website)
Training & Certification
SWANA Land of Lincoln will be hosting in-person MOLO training in Wheeling on September 16 - 18. Registration is $1,200 and includes all course materials and refreshments. Register online here - note that a payment link will be shared on screen and via email once the web form is completed. Checks can be sent to: SWANA Illinois, P.O. Box 2037, Glen Ellyn, IL 60138.
Conference Update
Registration is open for the Illinois Circularity Conference, a joint venture between SWANA Land of Lincoln, the IL Recycling Foundation, and the IL County Solid Waste Management Association. The Conference will take place on October 14 & 15 in East Peoria. All members of SWANA Illinois in good standing receive $100 off registration. The member rate is $350 per person. Daily registrations are also available.
This is the only materials management conference this year focused on Illinois policy, players and progress! You don't want to miss it! Visit the conference website to see the preliminary program and to register. Sponsorships and exhibit space are also still available! Hotel rooms are available at a group rate at the Embassy Suites for most convenient access to the Conference Center space.
YP Corner
SWANA Land of Lincoln's YP group met in person for fun and learning on June 24th in Oak Brook. With 22 people in attendance, we had a great showing! Attendees mixed and mingled, enjoyed some snacks, and learned or refreshed their knowledge on the ins and outs of Pollution Control Facility siting and permitting, courtesy of information presented by Chapter Board VP, Walter Willis and Chapter Director, Steve Schilling. The Board thanks YP Liaison, Spencer LaBelle for organizing and all who attended! We encourage anyone 35 and younger or with less than 5 years in the industry to reach out to [email protected] and join us for future meetings and outings.
Safety Moment & Call to Action
The recent recall of more than 1 million Anker power banks has all but forced an undue financial and operational burden on local and state governments in Illinois and made it nearly impossible for consumers to safely dispose their recalled items, while Anker avoids any cost of managing their unsafe product. The lack of coverage of disposal costs is included in at least one class action lawsuit filed in response to this recall. This article highlights the issues identified by the SWANA Illinois Chapter Board and requests concerned members and peers to file a complaint with the Consumer Product Safety Commission seeking a more appropriate remedy for this and future recalls connected to lithium-ion batteries.
Anker and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued the power bank recall June 12, directing consumers to file a claim for a replacement and “safely dispose” the recalled power bank. While the disposal instructions responsibly note they should not be placed in the trash, recycling, or retailers’ battery boxes, the only “safe” outlet that identified is local household hazardous waste (HHW) facilities – and if the HHW facility can’t take it, consumers should contact their municipality for further guidance.
Illinois’s HHW disposal facilities and collections are almost exclusively government-funded, meaning Anker has placed burdensome costs on local and/or state governments (if those facilities choose to accept the recalled devices) and directed consumers to municipal staff who lack any direction to provide their residents about safe management of the devices. Illinois EPA will NOT fund management of the devices from the HHW facilities for which it provides disposal costs or collect them at state-sponsored HHW collection events. If local government owned HHW facilities choose to manage them at their own expense, the cost is estimated at up to $18 per pound due to the specialized packaging and shipping required to comply with US DOT regulations for damaged and recalled batteries. To date, only the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County’s facility in Gurnee is known to be collecting the devices at their own cost; it is unknown if others will be able to do the same. Another option may be collection by electronics recyclers, which will again be at the recyclers’ discretion and expense.
This is not the first lithium battery-containing product to have a significant recall; Samsung recalled nearly 2 million Galaxy Note 7 phones in 2016 and funded the full cost of collecting and returning the recalled phones through numerous methods, achieving a 97% recall rate by making returns simple and convenient. As noted by the CPSC at the time, “A 97 percent recall rate is almost unheard of…The historic figure is less than 50%...even when auto safety is concerned. People have an amazing ability to avoid doing things in their best interest if it’s inconvenient.” Given current direction from Anker and the CPSC, it seems likely the Anker recall will be in the less than 50% range, leaving hundreds of thousands of unsafe devices in peoples’ homes or improperly disposed in trash or curbside recycling, creating fire hazards and safety issues for the waste and recycling industries.
The SWANA Illinois Chapter Board strongly disagrees with Anker pushing the obligation and cost of managing the unsafe, recalled product they sold – and profited from – onto local and state governments and not ensuring a convenient, safe disposal option is available to consumers. It sets a dangerous precedent when a producer can shift costs of safety recalls onto the public sector and disposal effort onto consumers, and it disincentivizes product developers to properly test their products before they reach consumers. The Board encourages concerned Chapter members and peers to file a recall complaint with the CPSC, specifically citing the insufficiency of available disposal options funded by the company to safely dispose of recalled Anker power banks.
