The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE G3

advantage of the waiver. But don’t wait until the last minute. Borrowers who are working in public service but have not applied for the program should do so by Oct. 31. You can find out more about the waiver at studentaid.gov/pslf.

How likely is another payment pause? The Biden administration has backtracked before on ending the relief. But it would be wise to start thinking now about how to incorporate your loan payments back into your budget. The relief will end eventually, so get ready for repayment.

But what about the promised student loan forgiveness? You can keep hope alive, but it’s still unclear whether widespread loan forgiveness will ever happen. There’s so much disagreement about this debt, you’d be wise not to count on your student loan obligation being wiped out or greatly reduced.

unaffordable, there is something you can do. Mayotte recommends that borrowers look into applying for the Income-Contingent Repayment Plan by consolidating their Parent Plus loans into a Direct Consolidation Loan.

Can I still take advantage of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) waiver? Under the PSLF program, the remaining balance of a borrower’s debt is forgiven after 120 qualifying monthly payments. Many people thought they were working their way to forgiveness only to find out they weren’t eligible because the type of loan they had wasn’t eligible, or they weren’t in a certain type of income-driven repayment plan or working for a qualifying employer. Others complained that t heir loan servicers misled them about their eligibility for PSLF or steered them to more forbearance or deferral options. As part of an effort to address problems with the PSLF, the Education Department introduced last year a time- limited waiver that would count previously ineligible payments toward PSLF, including for people with previously ineligible types of federal student loans. You still have time to take

and continue to change who the servicer is,” Mayotte said. Navient, which was a major student loan servicer, exited the federal servicing business last year.

I won’t be able to afford my loan payment when they start up again. What can I do to lower it? If you’re still struggling and you haven’t already done so, look into lower payment options, including various income-based repayment plans. In some cases, depending on your income, family size and where you live, your monthly payment could be extremely low, even zero. For more information about the plans go to studentaid.gov. “We can almost always find a solution for people who are struggling with federal loans,” Mayotte said. If your payment won’t be affordable and you need to apply for an income-based payment plan or hardship deferral, start putting in the paperwork no later than July to make sure it’s processed in time for the first payment due date, Mayotte said.

Is there any help for people with Parent Plus loans? If you have a Parent Plus loan and the monthly payment is

through a spokesperson. Borrowers won’t be subject to collection actions such as a tax refund offset or wage garnishment. The Education Department said that in the coming weeks, additional information will be posted at studentaid.gov and borrowers will receive direct communication about how this relief will affect them directly.

How should I prepare for when my loan payments start up again? The first thing you should do is make sure your loan servicer has your most current contact information. Don’t assume if the servicer doesn’t contact you that you’re off the hook. Update your contact information with your loan servicer and in your studentaid.gov profile. Open your mail — snail and email. Seriously. Ignoring your responsibility will only make things worse. Make sure you know what company is handling your student loans, said Betsy Mayotte, president of TISLA (The Institute of Student Loan Advisors), a nonprofit organization that offers free student loan advice. “During this whole covid pause, we’ve had a lot of servicer upheaval, and loans have been

BY CHRIS VELAZCO

One week after a fire destroyed
a building at a battery recycling
facility in Dalton, Ga., owner La-
mar Bearden still doesn’t know
exactly what happened.
Here’s what he does know:
Around 12:50 p.m. on March 25,
one of his employees walked
through a dark storage area at
Asset Recycling and Recovery
where batteries earmarked for re-
cycling were being kept. Nothing
seemed out of the ordinary. But 10
minutes later, after the employee
had locked up and moved on to
other things, something went
wrong in the room he had just left.
“That sucker was on fire,”
Bearden said.
The cause, as best as he can tell,
was a lithium-ion battery that may
have gotten damaged in transit
and caused a spark that ignited
the blaze. None of the batteries
being stored in the facility for
recycling was mishandled,
Bearden said, before adding that
the company now gets so many
that employees can’t always check
every one that arrives.
“We may be crazy, but we’re not
careless,” he said.
Between a steady drumbeat of
new gadget announcements, our
collective embrace of tiny elec-
tronics and rising demand for a
new generation of fully electric
cars, our reliance on powerful,
rechargeable batteries continues
to deepen. All the while, battery-
related accidents such as the one
Bearden describes — including
some that could be avoided entire-
ly — have grown all too common.
In January, two firefighters
were injured while responding to
a blaze said to be caused by dis-
carded lithium-ion batteries at a
recycling plant in Taylor, Tex. And
just weeks ago, the U.S. Coast
Guard issued an alert to marine
safety personnel describing how a
China-bound container that was
“illegally loaded” with discarded
lithium-ion batteries caught fire
while being transported to the
Port of Virginia in 2021.
These incidents are part of a
trend that has put the recycling
industry — and the government —
on edge. The Environmental Pro-
tection Agency said in a report
published last summer that it
found evidence of 245 fires across
28 states between 2013 and 2020
that were probably caused by lithi-
um metal batteries or recharge-
able lithium-ion batteries. And
that figure, the agency says, is
probably lower than it should be
because not all incidents are made
public or are covered by the me-
dia.
The Biden administration has
earmarked $3 billion for battery
innovation and recycling, but for
now it’s up to state lawmakers and
local governments to figure out
how to deal with — and try to
prevent — these accidents.
The rate of incidents is “increas-
ing, not staying the same,” said Joe
La Mariana, executive director of
RethinkWaste, a municipal waste
management agency in Northern
California. In September 2016, a
four-alarm fire caused by a re-
chargeable lithium-ion battery
tore through a recycling facility
operated by RethinkWaste, result-
ing in millions of dollars in dam-
age and a full shutdown of the
plant for four months. And since
coming back online, La Mariana
says, fires caused by these batter-

ies still happen regularly. Even though the facilities and processes designed to responsibly handle these batteries aren’t im- mune to accidents, at least some of these incidents can be avoided entirely. And the answer is per- haps all too obvious: Stop throw- ing out things with rechargeable batteries where they don’t belong. “They need to be treated properly,” said Jeffrey Spangenberger, director of the ReCell Center, a battery recycling research and de- velopment center established by the Department of Energy. “If you throw them in the garbage, they can be crushed by machinery or abused. A lot of people want to recycle them, which is what you should be doing with them, but they put them in their curbside bin. And that’s not the right thing to do, either.” Trying to recycle these kinds of batteries the wrong way can be as bad as not recycling them at all. Because recycling can be confus- ing enough to get right as it is, here’s our guide to what you should do with these batteries — and the products they live inside — once they’ve outlived their useful- ness.

Consumer electronics batteries The best thing to do with these items — old phones, laptops or anything else you can hold in your hands — is to make sure they live as long a usable life as possible. But eventually, the batteries inside all these products degrade to the point where they can’t effec- tively do their jobs. And that’s the point at which your search for responsible recycling methods re- ally begins. Municipal recycling programs: Not every town offers e- waste or battery recycling ser- vices, but enough do that it’s worth checking to see whether you can drop off old electronics and the aging batteries that powered them. Local battery recyclers: If your local government doesn’t have a way for you to safely rid yourself of these old batteries, expand your search with websites such as Call2Recycle and Earth911. Both maintain extensive databases of recycling facilities along with straightforward explanations of what those places do and don’t accept. Big-box stores: For most people, their old rechargeable batteries are attached to — or sealed inside of — consumer gadgets that came from a chain retailer. Stores such as Best Buy and Staples offer programs where you can lug your old products or loose rechargeable batteries into retail locations, where they can be dealt with by downstream recycling partners. Product manufacturers: In some cases, the companies that build the devices that use rechargeable batteries have devel- oped programs to responsibly de- commission them. Dell, for exam- ple, will accept any device with its branding on it via mail for recycling and allows people to drop off old electronics at participating Goodwill stores. Others, like Sam- sung, will direct you to local recycling facilities. One last thing to keep in mind: If you plan to recycle rechargeable batteries, be sure to cover their terminals with tape before you store and transport them.

Single-use batteries Some companies that once re- lied on single-use batteries have begun to move on from them. Ikea, the popular purveyor of meatballs and flat-pack furniture, has said it has done away with alkaline batteries entirely in favor or rechargeable ones. Even so, you probably still have a cache of AAs and AAAs tucked away in a drawer somewhere. In most states, you can pull a pair of single-use AA batteries out of a remote control and toss them in the trash without consequence. (Among the list of holdouts is Cali- fornia, which considers those kinds of batteries the same type of hazardous material as used rechargeable ones.) But just because you’re legally allowed to throw away those batteries doesn’t mean you should. The EPA’s guidance on the matter is clear: It’s still worth sending used alkaline or zinc carbon batteries to a specialized recycler. Our advice: If you were planning to periodically recycle some of your rechargeable batteries anyway, fill up a bag with depleted single-use batteries and take it with you. You don’t need to worry about taping up the terminals on standard AAs and AAAs, but you should for 9- volt batteries and tiny button cell batteries.

Electric vehicle batteries Big batteries have become fix- tures in some people’s lives, espe- cially those who have committed themselves to more eco-friendly ways of getting around. Thankful- ly, dealing with some of those batteries once they’ve reached the end of their useful life is easier than you might expect. For batteries that once powered electric scooters and mobility scooters, your best bet is to hunt down a local battery recycler that can responsibly handle them with the search tools provided by Earth 911 and Call2Recycle. Because these batteries aren’t quite as common as others, though, you should call ahead to prospective recyclers to make sure they’re able to accept them. The process is slightly easier if you’re dealing with an electric bike battery. Call2Recycle, g ives you the option of searching for local bike shops that accept batteries used by two dozen popular cycling brands. But what about cars? Thanks in part to h igh fuel prices, demand for electric vehicles is on the rise. Research firm Gartner forecasts 6 million EVs and hybrids will be shipped this year, up 50 percent from more than 4 million shipped in 2021. Between that surge in interest and increasing costs of key resources such as lithium, properly recycling EV batteries is going to become a key priority for carmakers. The ReCell Center’s Spangen- berger says “there aren’t many [electric] vehicle batteries reach- ing end of life” yet, because many of the most popular models were released within the past 10 years. But when — not if — your Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf or Tesla Mod- el 3 starts giving you significantly less range than it used to, your first stop should be to your d ealership. If needed, aging batteries can be dismantled and handed over to recycling facilities or, in some cases, repurposed to power other ma- chines instead.

HELP DESK

Rechargeable batteries cause fires.

Here’s how to properly dispose of them.

GUSTAF ÖHRNELL HJALMARS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

the pandemic? When someone defaults on their student loans, tax refunds can be seized, wages can be garnished and part of Social Security payments (including disability benefits) can be withheld. Defaulted borrowers can’t qualify for income-driven repayment programs and hardship deferments. “Once a family struggles with unaffordable student loan debt, they can have the social safety net pulled out from underneath them,” Shafroth said. At the start of the pandemic, under the Cares Act, collection actions for eligible defaulted loans were suspended. But many people worried about what would happen once the pause was over. The Education Department said these borrowers will now receive a “fresh start” and reenter repayment in good standing. “At the end of the payment pause, the negative mark of default will be removed from their credit,” the Education Department said in a statement

But there was major news for
people who were in default.
The pause provided borrowers
in default temporary protection
from collection activities, but
that’s all. The Biden
administration announced that
these borrowers won’t go back
into collections after the pause
ends.
This will greatly relieve the
financial pressure on millions of
borrowers, including those from
minority and low-income
households, said Abby Shafroth,
interim director of the National
Consumer Law Center’s Student
Loan Borrower Assistance
Project.
“These borrowers will no
longer be subject to the
financially destabilizing
collection practices that the
government uses to collect on
student loans once they’re in
default,” Shafroth said.

What help will I get if my
loans were in default before

COLOR FROM G1

MICHELLE SINGLETARY

Student loan borrowers

in default get new help

If you have a personal finance question for Michelle, please call 1- 855-ASK-POST (1-855-275-7678). Her award-winning column The Color of Money is syndicated by The Washington Post News Service and Syndicate and carried in dozens of newspapers.

WE WERE THERE WHEN THE

OLD HOUSE GOT TOO SMALL.

WE’LL BE THERE WHEN

THIS ONE GETS TOO BIG.

MOR

TGAGE

LO

ANS

Let’s talk about your options. Call us at 800.399.5919 or visit sandyspringbank.com/mortgage.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

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