Tackling the Solid Waste Crisis

New York is facing a solid waste, toxics, and plastic pollution crisis, which is contributing to climate change and polluting our communities and waterways. A January 2022 international report found that the world is beyond the toxic tipping point. This scientific study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, found that "the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals," a clear indication that we've crossed a boundary. Crucially, production of single-use plastics shows no signs of slowing down and has been exponentially increasing. Since 1950, there has been a 50-fold increase in plastic production. This number is expected to triple by 2050. And reliance on plastics is worsening the global climate crisis. Over 99% of plastics are sourced from fossil fuels. The most common source of plastic resin in the United States is natural gas. This means that the more plastic society uses, the longer the fossil fuel industry is kept running. NYPIRG is working to ensure that New York moves forward with policies that prevent the production of waste and improve successful recycling initiatives.

Solution: Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

New York’s strategy to address solid waste must stress its Waste Hierarchy mandated by law. At the top of the hierarchy is waste reduction, followed by reuse, and then recycling. Echoing this, the state’s Climate Law Scoping Plan calls for a “dramatic shift in the way waste is managed” by 2050. Highlighting the need for a circular economy approach, it stresses the need to reduce waste across the state to end reliance on landfills and incineration. NYPIRG is committed to these guiding principles in our approach to solid waste policy. New York has taken some steps in the right direction by banning plastic bags and foamed polystyrene, but the work cannot stop there. To address the solid waste crisis, New York should:

• Require producers of consumer goods to bear responsibility for recycling and disposal of their product’s packaging: A significant contributor to our waste and plastic pollution crisis is that consumer brand-owners are not on the hook to deal with the impact of their product’s packaging. Nearly 30% of the waste stream is packaging, much of it unrecyclable. Product producers have no requirements or incentives to reduce packaging waste, create reusable products, make packaging easier to recycle, or boost market demand by using more recycled content. To deal with this problem, a policy idea called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requires companies to be financially responsible for mitigating the environmental impacts of their product’s packaging through reduction, recycling, and reuse.
• Update and expand the state’s highly successful container deposit redemption program, the Bigger Better Bottle Bill: One of the most successful recycling and litter reduction programs in New York is the Container Deposit Law, called the Bigger Better Bottle Bill. As an EPR policy, the Bottle Bill not only ensures that products are recyclable, but also creates the financial incentive to ensure that the containers will be recycled. After its four decades of success, the Bottle Bill should be modernized by expanding the law to include popular non-carbonated beverages, wine, spirits, and hard cider – and by increasing the redeemable deposit value to 10 cents to increase the rate of recovery.
  Modernization of the 40-year-old Bottle Bill will further enhance litter control (most notably in underserved lower income communities), help stimulate recycling efforts, encourage the use of refillable containers, and is a matter of economic justice that will provide badly needed funding for communities that face low redemption rates due to inadequate access to retailers and redemption centers. States with bottle deposit laws have a beverage container recycling rate of around 60%, while non-deposit states only reach about 24%. The national group ReLoop stated in a 2022 report that the Bottle Bill’s expansion and deposit increase to a dime would likely result in a 90% recycling redemption rate.
• Reduce plastic in the marketplace: New York State should ban rigid polystyrene containers and packaging and adopt “upon request” policies for plastic straws, utensils, and stirrers. Municipalities including New York City have started to pass these laws locally already.
• Transition the market towards more reusable items.

*Check out our New Yorkers Guide to Fight Plastic Pollution.