By DAVID POGUE —
The premise of this monthly column has always been simple: I’m trying to be a good eco-citizen, but damn, they make it hard!
This year, I found a kindred soul — in our state senator.
Some background. Hard though it may be to imagine, plastic wasn’t a commonplace consumer material until the 1950s. My parents, for example, grew up in a world without plastic. Maybe yours, too.
But once chemists started fooling around with waste materials from oil processing, they realized that they had themselves a wonder material. Plastic was cheap, durable, sanitary, strong and lightweight. They came up with thousands of variations.
Now, after 65 years, we’ve pretty much mastered the art of making plastic. What we haven’t yet figured out is what to do with plastic once we’re done with it.
And no, “recycle it” isn’t the answer. Recent studies indicate that only about 6 percent of U.S. plastic gets recycled. The rest goes to landfill, or it’s burned, or it winds up in the ocean. (The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, the oceans will contain, by weight, more plastic than fish.) From there, it breaks down into microplastics and winds up in your body. They’ve found these particles in our blood, lungs, intestines, heart muscle, breast milk, fetuses and babies.
Plastic in our babies? Yeah, not great.
I mean, if ever there were an issue that Democrats and Republicans could agree on, you might think that petroleum by-products polluting our bodies would be it.
If I’ve managed to fully depress you at this point, then you’ll welcome this segue to the good news. Our own state — in fact, our own District 40 state Sen. Pete Harckham — is leading the charge to fix things.
This year, he co-introduced the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (NY State Senate Bill S4246D) in Albany. It would be the strongest plastic-packaging reduction law in history. It would be a model for other states. (Five states have passed packaging-reduction bills, but they’re far weaker.)
And it would mean that for once, we’d feel like somebody is doing something.
The PRRIA would require big packagers (over $5 million in revenue a year) to meet recycling standards, reduce their use of toxic plastics, and pay fees that incentivize eco-friendly designs and penalize nonrecyclable materials. Overall, the bill would save New York towns hundreds of millions a year — and cut plastic packaging waste by half in 12 years.
Today’s cars and appliances are stunningly more efficient than they were 10 years ago, because of regulations precisely like these, “so why not environmental standards for packaging?” says Judith Enck. She’s a former EPA regional administrator and now the president of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit that helped to craft the PRRIA bill.
New Yorkers, overall, loved this bill. Our country leads the world in plastic trash; each of us jettisons about 300 pounds of it every year. Who could possibly object to shifting some of the costs of cleanup from the taxpayers to the polluters?
You already know who: the oil industry. Its lobbyists descended en masse on Albany, collaring lawmakers one at a time, arguing that it’s unfair to make plastic producers responsible for their messes.
Yet somehow, incredibly, committee by committee, the PRRIA bill managed to pass through the Senate. All it needed was a vote in the Assembly and the governor’s signature, and it would become law.
And then, just as the legislative session was about to wrap up (it runs January to June), the congestion-pricing thing happened.
You may remember this proposal, which would have introduced tolls at the most congested parts of Manhattan to reduce traffic and emissions, improve air quality and pedestrian safety, and raise money to rebuild the subway and bus systems.
The plan had passed both the Senate and the Assembly. But in the final days of the legislative session, “Gov. Hochul proposed a ‘pause’ on congestion pricing, and that sent Albany into a tailspin,” says Enck. “The moment she announced this, I thought, ‘oh my God, we’re screwed.’”
And sure enough, as the clock ticked down on the session, the legislators spent precious time running in and out of conferences and caucuses, trying to figure out how to fix the massive new hole in New York’s transit budget. The packaging bill never came up for its final vote. “It truly ran out of time in the Assembly,” Enck says.
Hope, however, is not dead. The legislature sometimes convenes a “special session” during the off-season to process urgent new legislation. They did so in 2020 to pass COVID-19 laws, for example, and again in 2022 to pass urgent gun-control legislation (after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York’s concealed-carry law). Enck says there’s “a teeny-tiny chance” of a special session in December to pass the PRRIA.
If not, the bill will have to wait until the legislators meet again in January — and it will have to begin the long slog toward passage once again.
Unfortunately, chemists haven’t yet come up with a material with all the virtues of plastic but without its foreverness. But they may not have to.
Samsung, Google (Pixel, Fitbit, Nest), Ecobee, Sonos and Apple have all managed to eliminate plastic from their product packages. (You know the white Apple decals that have come in every Mac and iPhone box since the beginning? Gone.) They’re all managing just fine with various high-tech cardboards.
Last time I bought a Gillette razor or Glide dental floss, they came in cardboard, too. Nobody suffered.
In the longer term, Enck favors the return of the milk-bottle model that worked so well for 50 years. Companies like Blueland sell cleaning products on that same “Buy once, refill forever” model. (The refills are available at Costco, Target, Walmart, and so on.) Companies like Planet Renu, Plaine Products, Malie, Attitude and Filaree are working to scale up similar models.
DeliverZero offers reusable takeout containers to restaurants, and then helps organize their return. Re:Dish offers reusable cups, plates, bowls and clamshells to institutional cafeterias (corporations, arenas, schools, hospitals, and so on) and then collects, sanitizes and returns them.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of plastic resistance you can do yourself. When you’re at a store, decline the plastic bag if you’re walking only 50 feet to your car. When you’re at a fast-food place, decline the lid on your bowl if you’re going to eat in. Carry a sports bottle instead of buying water in disposable bottles. Throw your empty toothpaste tubes into the recycling, not the trash. (Yes! In the last year, Colgate, Crest and others have developed recyclable tubes. You’ll spot the logo.)
Clearly, I’m a zealot on this thing. What can I say? I guess I’ve got plastic in my heart — in more ways than one.