I-PASS Transponders
In early 2024, the Illinois Tollway announced a statewide transition to windshield mounted stickers for electronic toll collection. As the stickers have been rolled out, the old transponders they replace are becoming obsolete.
Where Can I Recycle My Old Transponder?
Starting in 2025, you can bring your old I-PASS transponder to Kane County's Fabyan Parkway and West Dundee electronics recycling centers or to the Aurora pop-up events. Please note: we strongly recommend that you remove transponders from your tollway account before bringing to recycle. You may also return your transponder to any Tollway Customer Service Center or at a Tollway "get an I-PASS sticker" event.
An I-PASS Transponder Device (Photo: Illinois Tollway)
Why the Late Roll-out of Recycling?
Electronics recyclers are businesses that need to make a profit or at the very least break even on costs when they sell the materials inside electronic devices. Tollway transponders cost more to process than the materials inside them are worth. They contain a lithium metal battery and a tiny antenna mounted on a circuit board tightly sealed inside a plastic shell. This YouTube video shows the anatomy of a transponder. Individually, the battery and circuits in transponders can be recycled. However, the units are designed to be sealed permanently, and getting into them is labor-intensive, as the linked video demonstrates. Shredding, which is the industry standard practice for destroying electronic devices to extract circuit board material, isn't safe for items like transponders where the battery can't be removed first. Recycling these items is still, in our view, the right thing to do because according to the Illinois Tollway, there were 8.2 million transponders active at the end of 2021. 8.2 million of any electronic device going into landfills is very wasteful. However, the Tollway did not seem to have been aware of the economic challenges around recycling these devices prior to announcing the transition to stickers. Residents who followed the Tollway's initial advice to use Earth 911 to find battery recyclers and to take transponders there quickly found out that battery recyclers only accept loose batteries and a handful of cost-positive small electronics like old cell phones. A group of County recycling coordinators in Northeast Illinois, including the Kane County Recycling Coordinator, has been working with the Tollway to find a solution on this issue since spring of 2024. It took a while, but we are happy to have gotten to a point where our facilities can accept transponders, which will be returned to and recycled by the Tollway and its contractors.
