Environmental Justice Groups Tell Albany to Protect Their Communities by Reducing Plastic

ALBANY, NY (06/01/2026) (readMedia)-- Nineteen environmental justice groups sent a leader to Albany legislators urging them to bring the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464A Harckham/A1749A Glick) to a vote before session ends. The letter points to the many communities of color in New York that experience higher rates of illness and lower life expectancies because of plastic pollution:

• "The father of the term environmental racism, Dr. Robert Bullard, said the Brookhaven landfill is a 'textbook case of environmental racism.' ... The neighboring North Bellport community suffers with the highest emergency room visits for asthma in Suffolk County - in 2018, North Bellport had the lowest life expectancy on Long Island."
• "Reducing waste is urgent for communities like Hunts Point and Mott Haven in the South Bronx, where waste from the entire borough is brought to transfer stations via diesel trucks. In total, 13,000 trucks drive through Hunts Point daily and 6,000 tons of garbage flows to Mott Haven, causing asthma, infant mortality, cognitive impairment, obesity, dementia, early death, and diminishing quality of life and peoples' ability to thrive."
• "Burning waste is dirtier than coal-fired power plants, and we have more incinerators than other states. The Peekskill community lives with Westchester county's largest industrial air polluter, the Wheelabrator incinerator, which burns all of Westchester County's waste. They are breathing potentially thousands of toxic chemicals from burning plastic. Wheelabrator has been operating on a permit that expired in 2021, and they are not required to test for most of the chemicals they burn."

Read the full letter here.

As momentum grows in support of PRRIA, the plastic and petrochemical industries, along with massive corporations that use plastic, are ramping up their lobbying and spending to kill the bill. The legislation continues to be one of the most lobbied bills. Opposition claims the legislation will cause prices to go up, but there is no credible evidence to support their scare tactics.

According to Consumer Reports, "It is important to note that there is no evidence that consumer prices go up as a result of an extended producer responsibility (EPR) policy. A study funded by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality analyzed actual prices of products on shelves before and after EPR legislation was passed in Canada and found that they did not increase. In Europe, which has had packaging EPR programs in operation for over 35 years, prices have also remained stable." This is because packaging is typically only 2% of the total cost of a product. In fact, it's plastic itself that's expensive - plastic is made out of fossil fuels, and oil prices are rising right now due to the Iran war.

BACKGROUND

Adoption of the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464A Harckham/A1749A Glick) will transform the way our goods are packaged. It will dramatically reduce waste and ease the burden on taxpayers by making companies, not taxpayers, cover the cost of managing packaging. The bill will:

• Reduce single-use packaging by 30% incrementally over 12 years;
• Require most packaging - including plastic, cardboard, paper, and metal - to meet recycling rates;
• Prohibit the harmful process known as chemical recycling to count toward achieving these recycling rates;
• Prohibit the worst toxic chemicals to be used in packaging, including all PFAS chemicals, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), lead, mercury, and formaldehyde; and
• Establish a modest fee on packaging paid by big companies, with new revenue going to local taxpayers.

A report from Beyond Plastics, "Projected Economic Benefits of the New York Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act," shows how New Yorkers would save $1.3 billion in just one decade after the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act becomes law. These savings would come from the avoided costs of waste management when there's less waste to manage, and they don't even include the funds that would be brought in after placing a fee on packaging paid by product producers. A new analysis from Beyond Plastics builds on this report, and finds that nine selected communities across New York state could benefit by more than $411 million each year after adopting the legislation from annual waste reduction savings, as well as an estimate of the revenue local governments will make when plastic polluters pay.

Because this bill will save New Yorkers money and protect their health, a bipartisan 73% of New York voters are in favor of the bill. More than 300 organizations and businesses - including Beyond Plastics, Hip Hop Caucus, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, League of Women Voters, Environmental Advocates, NYPIRG, Earthjustice, and others - issued a memo of support stating, "This bill would save tax dollars and position New York as a global leader in reducing plastic pollution."

This fight is David v. Goliath. Last year, there were a whopping 106 registered businesses and organizations working against the bill - megacorporations like ExxonMobil, Shell, McDonald's, Amazon, and Coca-Cola. Read more about the lobbying around PRRIA here.

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's report, "Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception." These New York bills do not ban chemical recycling but simply do not allow chemical recycling to count as real recycling.

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 products are made from fossil fuels and may contain as many as 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. 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 contains as many as 16,000 chemicals - many of them toxic. Over the past two decades, many retailers and manufacturers have already begun to voluntarily phase out some of these toxic chemicals like BPA (demonstrating that removing chemicals can be done!), but PFAS, PVC, mercury, and more are still in plastic, making their way into our bodies.

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 microplastic particles 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: Research in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that microplastics are linked to increased heart attacks, strokes and premature deaths. Another study from Columbia University found that bottled water can contain hundreds of thousands of plastic fragments.

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