Legislation to Curb Plastic Pollution and Save Taxpayers Money Passes Senate Environmental Conservation Committee
For Immediate Release: March 11, 2025
Contact: Marissa Solomon, marissa@pythiapublic.com, (734) 330-0807
ALBANY, N.Y. — Today, the New York State Senate’s Environmental Conservation Committee passed the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464 Harckham / A1749 Glick) after the Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee passed the bill last week.
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, issued the following statement in response:
“Nobody voted for more plastic, yet taxpayers are forced to spend hundreds of millions every year just to deal with all of the waste — and the cancer, heart disease, and respiratory and reproductive issues associated with it. We thank Senate Environmental Committee Chair Pete Harckham for moving his visionary bill through the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee, and for bringing New York state one step closer to addressing our growing plastic pollution problem. Now we need this bill to come to the floor in both houses for a vote. Plastic polluters should be on the hook for the mess they’re making.”
Next, the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act will be voted on in the Senate Finance Committee and Assembly Committee on Codes. Last year, the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act passed the Senate in June 2024 by a vote of 37-23, and passed four committees in the state Assembly. When the 2024 legislative session ended, a Siena Poll found that 58% to 31% of New York voters think the legislature should have passed the bill. The bill was popular across party lines, with 67% of Democrats, 44% of Republicans, and 54% of Independents agreeing it should have passed.
Background
The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464 Harckham/A1749 Glick) will transform the way our goods are packaged. It will dramatically reduce waste and ease the burden on taxpayers by making companies, not consumers, cover the cost of managing packaging. The bill will:
Reduce plastic packaging by 30% incrementally over 12 years;
By 2052, all packaging — including plastic, glass, cardboard, paper, and metal — must meet a recycling rate of 75% (with incremental benchmarks until then);
Prohibit 17 of packaging’s worst toxic chemicals, including all PFAS chemicals, vinyl chloride, lead, mercury, formaldehyde, and bisphenols;
Prohibit the harmful process known as “chemical recycling” to be considered real recycling;
Establish a modest fee on packaging paid by product producers, with new revenue going to local taxpayers; and
Establish a new Office of Inspector General to ensure that companies fully comply with the new law.
Because the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act would save tax dollars, over 30 localities across the state have passed resolutions urging Albany leaders to pass the bill. The New York City Council passed a resolution in support, and Mayor Adams released a memorandum of support in favor of the legislation.
Last year, more than 300 organizations and businesses — including Beyond Plastics, NAACP, Mothers Out Front, League of Women Voters, Environmental Advocates of NY, NYPIRG, Earthjustice, Blueland, and DeliverZero — issued a memo of support stating, “This bill would save tax dollars and position New York as a global leader in reducing plastic pollution.”
Plastics and Climate
Plastic production is warming the planet four times faster than air travel, and it’s only going to get worse with plastic production expected to double in the next 20 years. Plastic is made from fossil fuels and contains 16,000 chemicals, many of them known to be harmful to humans and even more untested for their safety. Most plastics are made out of ethane, a byproduct of fracking. In 2020, plastic’s climate impacts amounted to the equivalent of nearly 49 million cars on the road, according to a conservative estimate by Material Research L3C. And that’s not including the carbon footprint associated with disposing of plastic.
Plastics and Health
Less than 6% of plastic in the United States actually gets recycled, and only 9% of all the plastic waste ever generated, globally, has been recycled. The rest ends up burned at incinerators, buried in landfills, or polluting rivers and the ocean — an estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean every year.
Plastic is being measured everywhere, and microplastics are entering our soil, food, water, and air. Scientists estimate people consume, on average, hundreds of thousands of microplastics per year, and these particles have been found in human placenta, breast milk, stool, blood, lungs, and more.
Scientific research continues to find that the microplastics problem is worse than previously thought: New research in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that microplastics are linked to increased heart attacks, strokes and premature deaths. Another new study from Columbia University found that bottled water can contain hundreds of thousands of plastic fragments.
Why Chemical Recycling Isn’t a Solution
Because plastics recycling is a failure, the plastics and petrochemical industries are now pushing a pseudo-solution: “chemical recycling”, or “advanced recycling.” This is a polluting process that uses high heat or chemicals to turn plastic waste into fossil fuels or feedstocks to produce new plastic products. It’s a dangerous distraction that’s allowing companies to exponentially increase the amount of plastic — and greenhouse gases — they put into the world. Learn more from Beyond Plastics’ report, “Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception.” Although the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act would not ban “chemical recycling”, it would prohibit “chemical recycling” from being classified as true recycling.
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