Will New York Get New Plastic Packaging Requirements Right Or Wrong?
By Susan Arbetter | March 23, 2022 | Spectrum News 1
To get a handle on plastic packaging, there is a movement to get companies to take responsibility for all the waste they produce. It’s called Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR.
According to the group Beyond Plastics, strong and transparent EPR can be used to solve the growing problem of packaging waste and plastic pollution, but only if states get the details right and hold companies accountable.
Judith Enck, founder of Beyond Plastics and the former EPA administrator for Region 2 under President Barack Obama, argues that New York is going about EPR in the wrong way.
“This is incredibly complicated, and sadly [Gov. Kathy Hochul] gets the details wrong,” Enck told Capital Tonight.
According to Enck, the governor’s bill does not require any actual reduction in packaging, so it doesn’t help with the plastic pollution crisis.
Under Hochul’s EPR proposal, which is in her executive budget, packaging producers would need to submit a plan to improve the recyclability of their packaging by 2025. Then, they would need to begin implementing their plan a year later.
“The proposal calls for implementing an advisory committee by June 1, 2023, to consult on developing further program details, including annual minimum recovery rates, postconsumer recycled content rates and other considerations," the proposal says. "The committee would make its recommendations by April 1, 2024. According to the proposal, the committee must include members from municipalities, environmental organizations, environmental justice communities, the waste and recycling sectors, packaging manufacturers, retailers and other stakeholder groups. The proposal also calls for a third party to conduct a statewide needs assessment to evaluate the state’s existing recycling infrastructure, processing capacity, paper and packaging recovery rates and any barriers to equitable access to recycling and reuse programs."
Enck believes the process described above is too cumbersome. But worse in her mind is that the governor’s proposal allows for the chemical recycling of plastic.
“The plastics industry has finally admitted that plastics recycling has been a failure. So, their big move now is something called chemical recycling, which they insist isn’t burning, but it is heating plastic at a really high temperature,” Enck explained. “In fact, one of the technologies is pyrolysis, P-Y-R-O. So, it is plastic burning, and unfortunately, the governor’s bill allows this type of burning to count as recycling.”
According to the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, pyrolysis is “the heating of an organic material, such as biomass, in the absence of oxygen. Biomass pyrolysis is usually conducted at or above 500 °C, providing enough heat to deconstruct the strong bio-polymers mentioned above.”
Enck told Capital Tonight that she would like to see the governor’s EPR plan taken out of the budget “because it’s not a state fiscal issue.”
Another issue Enck has with the Hochul proposal is that the packaging companies themselves would get to determine how to limit their own packaging, which, she says, “is like asking the tobacco companies to draw up their own anti-smoking proposals."
Instead, Enck supports a different EPR bill which is currently being drafted by Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee Chairman Steve Englebright.