The Wrong Way To Clean Up Plastic Waste: New York Needs A Better Answer

Jennifer Congdon | March 29, 2022 | Daily News

Let’s talk trash. New York City creates a lot of it. Most of it is trucked out of state to landfills and incinerators, poisoning the air and water for people who live in those communities. And at the risk of completely disheartening you, most of the plastic that you put in your recycling bag doesn’t actually get recycled. That’s because most plastic is not recycled. Beverage bottles do enjoy a high recycling rate because the state’s deposit law keeps the material source-separated and clean.

This all matters because plastic pollution is a serious problem. Globally, at least 8 million metric tons of plastic pollution enter the ocean each year. Most of it comes from land — such as litter that reaches the East River or Hudson River, and then flows out to the Atlantic Ocean. This is the equivalent of a garbage truck dumping plastic into the ocean every minute.

The U.S. generates more plastic waste than any other nation. About 40% of virgin plastic production is used for plastic packaging and about 30% of our waste stream is packaging. So dealing with our overreliance on plastics for packaging is arguably the best place to start.

Enter a very poorly named, but well-meaning policy called “Extended Producer Responsibility,” or EPR for short. EPR for packaging, used in many places around the world, shifts the financial burden of managing packaging materials from taxpayers to the companies that control packaging decisions. Through the “polluter pays” principle, it really drives up recycling rates and helps alleviate the financial burden on taxpayers of managing all this trash. If we do it right, which is a big “if,” it will also result in packaging reductions and eliminate toxins that poison the circular economy.

Unfortunately, it looks like New York may get EPR wrong. Gov. Hochul and state Sen. Todd Kaminsky have both proposed bills that miss the mark by a long shot. Both of these bills fail to set forth clear or binding requirements for packaging reduction, recycling rates and recycled content and instead place the packaging companies themselves in charge of creating standards. That would be like putting the tobacco industry in charge of smoking cessation programs. It just won’t work. Both bills also fail to phase out the use of toxic chemicals in packaging and would allow for plastic burning to count as recycling.

If either of these bills passes, it will set us back years on achieving the packaging reductions that we need.

Assemblyman Steven Englebright, chair of the Environmental Conservation Committee, is about to introduce two bills that would create an effective EPR program in New York State and appropriately expand the state’s bottle recycling law at the same time.

Englebright’s EPR bill, in addition to providing taxpayers relief from the financial burden of dealing with packaging waste, would create requirements to reduce packaging, increase recyclability and recycled content in our packaging, ban plastic burning, and remove toxics from packaging.

His bill to expand New York’s 40-year-old and highly successful “Bottle Bill” will add deposits to non-carbonated beverage containers, wine and liquor and increase the deposit to a dime, which will increase recycling and provide a much-needed wage increase to the nearly 10,000 New Yorkers who pick up bottles and cans and return them for recycling. This group of freelance recyclers, known as “canners,” are the unsung recycling heroes of New York City. Canners rely on the deposits from containers that they collect as a main source of income and also provide an incredible public service by keeping these deposit containers off of our streets and out of our parks and waterways, at no cost to New York City. In 2019 alone, canners diverted 12 million containers from landfills and funneled them back into the redemption system.

Enacting an effective EPR for packaging law and updating New York’s Bottle Bill are once-in-a-decade opportunities and should be a vehicle for significantly reducing packaging, especially plastic. Jamming an ineffective EPR program through the budget process is no way to make the sausage. EPR and Bottle Bill expansion deserve the full attention of the Legislature after the budget is passed, because we have to get it right.