Washington Opens Public Comment on Its Draft Recycling Lists; Closes August 19

Washington’s Department of Ecology opened public comment on the preliminary statewide collection lists on August 5, 2026. Comments close at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on August 19, 2026, through an online comment form. The draft lists were posted as a spreadsheet dated August 3 and cover 96 material categories. What this means for you: these lists decide which materials Washington will require to be collected statewide, and that list is the yardstick your packaging gets measured against once the program starts charging. If a material you use is missing, or is described in a way that does not match how your pack is actually built, this two-week window is the cheapest moment to say so. It gets far more expensive to argue after the list is fixed. Until now Ecology had said only that a comment period would happen “in August” without publishing dates or a form, so this is the first time the window has been pinned down. Source: Washington Department of Ecology (August 2026).