(The Center Square) – A bill batting cleanup in the final hours of the 2025 Washington legislative session will increase penalties for littering and push out deadlines for retailers to offer thicker plastic bags at an increased cost of 12-cents a bag, up from the current 8-cent charge.
According to the WA Department of Ecology, tens of millions of pounds of litter accumulates along Washington’s roads and interchanges every year. Public areas like parks, recreation areas, and rest areas see another 11.6 million pounds annually.”
House Bill 1293, sponsored by Walla Walla GOP Rep. Mark Klicker, will raise the base penalty for littering to a Class 2 civil infraction, which carries a $125 fine.
Throwing trash out along state highways would bring even stiffer penalties and fines for unsecured loads would also go up.
“Right now, Washington state has 42% more litter than the national average,” said Klicker during a January hearing on the bill in the House Environment and Energy Committee. “That’s 73,000 pieces of garbage per mile, 1600 pounds per mile. Last year 38-million pounds of litter were deposited across the state of Washington. We only picked up six million pounds.”
According to the Department of Ecology, various groups conducting litter cleanup including the Ecology Youth Corps and Adopt-a-Highway programs spent more than 182,000 hours picking up trash along Washington highways in 2023, which only removed a small fraction of the blight.
The original bill would have set up a task force of experts, including agencies and business associations, to come up with solutions to address the litter problem, but that was stripped from the legislation by the Senate.
Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy, co-sponsored the bill.
“We have a litter tax that’s supposed to address litter. We also have a civil penalty, and it’s never used,” said Dye in an interview with The Center Square just in the House wings ahead of the bill’s final passage on Sunday, the last day of session. “We fought to have it raised so it’s more consequential to dissuade people from littering.”
Dye explained they’ve done comprehensive litter studies to see patterns in human behavior when it comes to careless discarding of waste.
“They did a litter study with a heat map and a substantial quantity of the litter is in the Puget Sound region, along the I-5 corridor,” she said. “You’ll see heat maps coming out of the fast-food places. They eat and they won’t carry it in their car and put into a garbage can, so these are kind of elements of human behavior that I would wonder if you did an actual polling of people that recycle versus the people that throw garbage out. There are two kinds of people.”
Dye said another change in the bill encourages state agencies to use a greater portion of the litter tax, which is paid by food producers on packaging, for litter cleanup.
“They [Ecology] take two-thirds or three-quarters of the litter tax revenue for advertising on recycling and behavior change and they only use a small amount for picking up litter along our highways and not even making a dent in it.”
Dye said there are states that are doing a much better job at litter cleanup.
“I was down in Arizona and there wasn’t a piece of litter anywhere, not even a gum wrapper,” she said. “The way they do it is they have a public-private partnership with these emergency response pickups that they run 24-7. They help at accident scenes, but when there isn’t an accident, they pick up litter and it’s funded by Geico and the state. When they finish at an accident scene, there isn’t anything left, no broken glass, there’s not a hubcap, nothing, so why can’t we do that?”
Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Vancouver, who chairs the House Environment and Energy Committee worked with Dye after the bill was amended in the Senate to remove the task force and increase the plastic bag fee to 12-cents by Jan. 1, 2026. House members objected to the amendments.
“The body across the rotunda did make some changes and this bill has been ping-ponging a bit. It’s been a challenging bill,” said Doglio and along with Dye got those amendments removed.
Rep. Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle, told The Center Square, the bill as passed in the final hours of session was a nice example of how Democrats and Republicans can work together.
“All worked really hard on that compromise, and I think that’s a really good show of bipartisanship on the litter issue,” said Fitzgibbon.
The Center Square reached out to the WA Department of Ecology for comment on the bill and received the following response from Communications Manager, Solid Waste Management Program at the Washington State Department of Ecology Dave Bennett.
“Littered debris from unsecured loads was responsible for 337 crashes and 32 injuries last year,” wrote Bennett. “The litter bill passed this session amended the penalty for littering from a class 3 to a class 2 civil infraction. We believe increasing penalties is an effective deterrent to littering. Since the carryout bag law went into effect in 2021, the number of plastic bags used in Washington has decreased. However, the amount of plastic used, by weight, has increased. The delay in the bag thickness increase to 4 mil will result in reduced plastic use and more time to study if thicker bags are sufficiently reused to offset their increased weight.”
The bill has not yet been signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson
