ICYMI: The Glick/Harckham Packaging Reduction Bill is Now on the Senate Floor and the Assembly Floor

ALBANY, NY (05/20/2026) (readMedia)-- The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA - S1464A Harckham/A1749A Glick) continues to gain momentum. Yesterday, the legislation passed through the Senate Finance Committee by a vote of 13-6. And in the Assembly, the legislation now has 76 co-sponsors - a majority of members.

The bill is now on the Senate floor, where it already passed in 2024 and 2025. In the Assembly, it passed through every committee last year and is on the Assembly floor, calendar No. 68. As the legislature prepares to vote on the worst budget for the environment in recent memory, lawmakers in both houses are prioritizing PRRIA.

The bill isn't just gaining momentum with lawmakers in Albany - last week, New York City Council Sanitation Chair Justin Sanchez wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News urging the legislature to pass PRRIA. Read the op-ed here and below. Sanchez also joined the New York City Department of Sanitation Commissioner Gregory Anderson and lawmakers for a press conference urging the legislature to pass the bill.

Albany must vote to limit plastic waste
By Justin Sanchez

Most New Yorkers probably don't know that the trash we throw away in the city is trucked hundreds of miles upstate to a landfill in the Finger Lakes, or hauled across the Hudson River to a polluting trash incinerator in Newark, which burns garbage and spews microplastics into the air in a primarily low-income community of color.

This is not only bad for the environment and peoples' health, but also enormously expensive for taxpayers. Why should New Yorkers pay more than half a billion dollars annually just to get rid of trash and make other communities sick?

Very little has been done to deal with this problem, but today, lawmakers in Albany have an opportunity to help protect our neighbors upstate and across the river, save our tax dollars, and protect our environment at the same time by passing the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act.

The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464/A1749) would require big companies to reduce their single-use packaging - also known as trash - by 30% over the next 12 years. The goal is simple: let's make the large corporations that wrap their products in so much unnecessary and wasteful packaging reduce that waste, and help us pay to get rid of the rest.

By reducing single-use plastic packaging by 30%, that means 30% less waste that city services will need to spend collecting, sorting, and transporting every year. That translates to an estimated $114 million per year in savings to taxpayers.

And by requiring the large companies sticking us with all this trash to pay a fee, New York City will be reimbursed around $266 million per year in trash collection and disposal costs. Add those together and that's $380 million in savings every year - it's seriously significant for taxpayers.

Beyond the taxpayer savings, the environmental and health benefits are clear. By setting limits on the amount of plastic waste that companies can use, and banning a handful of toxic chemicals - such as PFAS, lead, and mercury - in packaging, this legislation would protect our environment and health from dangerous microplastics.

Those same large companies polluting our environment and sticking us with the bill are doing everything they can to fight this legislation, including spreading lies that grocery costs will go up. But legislation like this isn't a new idea, despite what megacorporations like Amazon, McDonalds, and Coca Cola want you to think.

Similar laws are on the books in Europe, and there's no evidence that prices have gone up because of them. These companies don't care that they're costing you more and making people sick - they just don't want to change.

As chair of the City Council's Sanitation Committee, it's my job to ensure that the city does the best job it can in dealing with waste. We've made huge improvements in recent years, such as implementing curbside composting and containerization. But at the end of the day, we have to haul away the trash on the curb, and taxpayers have to cover it.

Until those megacorporations stop sticking us with so much waste, there's nothing the city can do. But state lawmakers can finally pass this legislation, and start saving families tax dollars while protecting our health and our environment.

Sanchez represents parts of the Bronx in the City Council.

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."

Despite so much support and undeniable benefits to taxpayers and communities, chemical and plastic lobbyists claim that the legislation will cause prices to go up. 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." Packaging is typically only 2% of the total cost of a product, and 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.

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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