SOURCE:
https://www.liherald.com/stories/adrienne-esposito-waste-business-recycling,215011?
By Adrienne Esposito - May 16, 2025
Consumers have changed our shopping habits across New York state. The transition to online shopping has significantly increased plastic, paper and cardboard packaging waste. Those materials go to Reworld, which takes our trash, and are turned into ash. The ash needs to go somewhere, but where?
On Long Island, most of the ash goes to Brookhaven Landfill, but that clock is ticking. The Brookhaven facility will soon reach its capacity for ash, and that means it will close in the next few years, leaving towns such as Hempstead and North Hempstead with no ash-disposal options on Long Island.
As packaging waste increases, recycling rates remain lackluster, which adds to our solid-waste burden. The good news is that we can reduce packaging waste and increase recycling rates to help address this challenge. Citizens Campaign for the Environment chairs a statewide coalition of environmental leaders, local governments, stakeholders and elected officials who have joined to back state legislation called the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. This important bill is urgently needed.
New York is experiencing a solid-waste crisis, with skyrocketing costs to municipalities, abysmal recycling rates, and plastic pollution littering our communities and waterways. Our state generates more than 17 million tons of municipal solid waste annually. Long Island is responsible for 1.6 million tons per year, 205,000 tons of which go to landfills off Long Island, and 1.4 million tons are sent to waste-to-energy facilities, resulting in 400,000 tons of ash that must be landfilled. There is currently no plan to manage this ash once the Brookhaven landfill is closed. The one wise choice everyone agrees on is to reduce our waste stream, and this legislation would do just that.
The financial burden of managing recyclable waste falls on local taxpayers. Municipalities are struggling with recycling costs and outdated infrastructure that significantly limits the volume of materials that are recycled. It is estimated that local governments statewide spend more than $200 million each year to keep local recycling programs going. That is not sustainable.
The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act would revolutionize New York’s approach to solid waste by shifting the responsibility of managing plastic, paper and packaging waste to corporations, not taxpayers and local governments. Those that put packaging into the waste stream are best positioned to reduce the amount of packaging that’s created in the first place.
The measure would require large corporations to reduce consumer packaging by 30 percent in 12 years, increase post-consumer recycled content in packaging and invest in new reuse/refill infrastructure. The bill includes strong oversight and enforcement provisions to ensure that corporations comply.
Other states, including California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon, have passed such laws, and similar policies have been in effect in parts of Europe and Canada for over 30 years. Where fully implemented, recycling rates exceed 70 percent, and the cost of consumer goods has not increased one penny.
It is time for corporations to take out their own trash! Each year, companies ship billions of products with excess packaging, exacerbating the solid-waste crisis, yet they bear no responsibility for managing the waste they create. This sensible legislation promises to save money for municipalities and taxpayers, remove toxic substances from packaging, increase recycling and require producers to reduce waste.
We need to modernize New York’s recycling system and make producers take responsibility for managing their packaging waste. We need the governor, the State Senate and the Assembly to support this critical bill and get it signed into law this year. Every year we do nothing is another year we waste money, and allow our solid-waste management problem to grow.
We can do this!
Adrienne Esposito is executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
