In the end, it may have been fears that Kraft Heinz would remove plastic tubs of Cool Whip or individually wrapped processed cheese slices from grocery store shelves that defeated an ambitious packaging reduction and recycling bill in the New York State Legislature.
Or perhaps it was the newspaper advertisements from pro-plastic lobbyists warning New Yorkers that “radical activists” were “about to ruin summer BBQ season.”
Whatever the cause, a bill that would have fundamentally reshaped how single-use plastic waste is managed in the fourth-largest state went down to defeat earlier this month in the New York State Assembly after passing in the State Senate, as lawmakers completed their regular legislative session for 2023.
“Our posture is, whenever the Assembly comes back, we are going to try again, whether that is next January, or sooner,” said Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond Plastics, an environmental group that backed the legislation. “We have come this far; we are not giving up. Plastic pollution is not going anywhere and neither are we.”
The opposition to the legislation, which included provisions known as “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, will be ready, too. Typically, EPR holds producers of products responsible for their management through the product’s lifecycle.
“We are not opposed to EPR for packaging,” said Ken Pokalsky, vice president of the Business Council of New York State, a business lobby organization. “We are opposed to this bill, which has a lot of flaws.”
Bill Was Touted as a Model
Several years in the making, the proposed Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act had followed a “polluter pays” philosophy, putting the financial burden for managing packaging waste on the companies that generate it, rather than taxpayers or government agencies.
“It will take us away from single-use plastics that are obliterating our environment, our oceans or just being burned,” or sent to landfills, New York state Sen. Pete Harckham (D-Westchester), the bill’s main sponsor in the Senate, told Inside Climate News. Less waste also means fewer heat-trapping gases blamed for causing climate change, he said.
Beyond Plastics saw the bill as a national model, and the most comprehensive in the country. It sought to address not only recycling and waste reduction but also would have banned some of the most toxic chemicals found in plastic packaging.
Five other states have passed EPR laws for plastic packaging, from Maine in 2021 to Minnesota, the latest, earlier this year. Maine and Minnesota both left many of the details to be worked out by state agencies.
California’s bill, passed in 2022, is the most ambitious to become law so far—seeking to cut single-use plastic packaging and food service ware by 25 percent; recycle 65 percent of single-use plastic packaging and food service ware; and make 100 percent of single-use packaging and plastic food service ware recyclable or compostable.
But some critics, Beyond Plastics among them, worry that the California law allows for easy exemptions, gives the industry too much control over itself and may have left the door open to chemical recycling, which in some common forms environmental groups consider to be tantamount to incineration, not actual recycling.
“We need a state to do it right,” said Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional director during the Obama administration who got her start in environmental advocacy by successfully lobbying for New York’s state’s 1982 Returnable Container Act, known as the bottle bill.
Pokalsky agreed that lawmakers and environmental advocates alike won’t give up on a plastics packaging bill for New York. But he called for scrapping the language in the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act and looking to Minnesota’s approach as a model.
“We would like to see a different starting point,” Polasky said.
Time Ran Out in the Assembly
Harckham, whose district includes Westchester County and part of the Hudson Valley, navigated the bill through the Senate, where it passed 37-23 on Friday, after vigorous debate and some concessions. But even though advocates backing the bill had counted enough votes in the Assembly to carry it through, it nonetheless failed to get across the finish line, following a fierce push by the pro-plastics lobby.
“We won the battle but lost the war,” Harckham said in an interview on Tuesday. Undeterred, he praised his colleague and co-sponsor, Assemblymember Deborah J. Glick (D-Manhattan), who steered the bill through the committee process but then “ran out of time for a floor debate,” in the session’s final hours.
In a sign that last-minute lobbying worked, several cosponsors in the Assembly took their names off the bill, Enck said.