New York weighs bold packaging law to cut landfill waste and reduce pollution, proposing to hold producers accountable.

New York City knows it has a waste management problem. The average city household generated 1,899 pounds of trash in 2023. Only around 17 percent of the city’s curbside waste is recycled, despite efforts to change, such as the city’s 2020 plastic bag ban. 

Much of the city’s solid garbage and waste, if it is not incinerated, ends up in large landfills upstate, in neighboring states including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and farther south in Virginia. 

A bill to winnow the waste, the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA), has been debated throughout the state’s legislative session this spring. The Senate approved the measure; it is still in play in the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee with only a few days left. 

The proposal would reduce the amount of non-recyclable packaging in the city by 30 percent over the next 12 years and make packaging producers contribute more to recycling efforts and disposal. 

And it faces tough opposition.

Businesses as well as companies with links to the petroleum and chemical industry have fought PRRIA, complaining about its “unworkable mandates,” scope and potential cost. The state Business Council issued a statement, signed by nearly 100 businesses and trade organizations, including from the plastics industry, that this year’s bill was little different from earlier failed proposals and did “nothing to address business’ key concerns.” 

Reducing packaging—and in particular plastics—could ease some sanitation, cost and worker safety concerns across New York City. It could reduce the annual tonnage of waste and fees paid to private haulers who have, according to some reports, cut corners when it comes to worker and public safety. And it could help the city deal with rodents that routinely munch into curbside refuse.

In October 2022, then-Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch led efforts to reduce trash and curbside vermin. While explaining a plan to limit what New Yorkers could put into plastic trash bags and when, Tisch uttered a now infamous call to action: “The rats don’t run this city, we do.” 

Tisch, who is now police commissioner, rolled back the number of hours that trash bags could wait on sidewalks before pickups. The new bill aims to shrink the total amount of trash on the street—and demands help from the businesses involved in the packaging food chain. 

PRRIA would require companies that produce packaging to register with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation and work with assigned experts to develop plans to cut waste and increase recycling.

The packaging companies would be prohibited from using specific chemicals in their products. They would also be required to fund waste-reduction efforts, like producing more reusable and refillable packaging, and developing better ways to recycle and compost, according to the Senate bill. Laws that demand producers have a direct role in reducing waste are referred to as extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws. California and Colorado already have such laws. 

Judith Enck, the president of the nonprofit organization Beyond Plastics, which targets plastic production and pollution, has advocated for waste legislation for the past two years. Opposition to the bill, she says, has been constant.

“This is David vs. Goliath on steroids,” said Enck, a former regional administrator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency. “There is a lot of opposition from the New York State Business Council, American Chemistry Council, ExxonMobil, Amazon. It’s a rogues’ gallery of polluters that have lined up to oppose the bill.”

The state Business Council has called the proposed legislation “unworkable and more aggressive than EPR laws in other states.” The American Chemistry Council, a trade group that represents some producers of plastic packaging and whose members include Dow, DuPont, Chevron and ExxonMobil, created a $250,000 ad campaign around the packaging reduction bill, according to New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom that reports on state politics and policy.

In response to questions from Inside Climate News, a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council noted that the trade group supports the Affordable Waste Reduction Act, another waste management bill introduced in the state Legislature this year. 

This alternative is less “extreme” than PRRIA and would create “real, lasting change—without forcing businesses to strip items from grocery store shelves or placing new costs on low-income communities,” the spokesman wrote in an email. The bill has been referred to the Environmental Conservation Committee in the Senate but has received no further action. Beyond Plastics calls it a “textbook weak EPR bill” that requires no reduction in waste.

The Business Council, meanwhile, circulated a report by its affiliate the Public Policy Institute of New York State that contends that the PRRIA bill would result in a $900 increase in household costs over five years. The costs of the legislation, the report said, would pass onto the consumer. 

Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organization that advocates for consumer protection, wrote in a memo of support for the Senate bill in March that “there is no evidence that consumer prices go up as a result of an EPR policy.” Other supporters, including Enck, also refute that consumer prices will rise. Enck’s Beyond Plastics published a report in April that the policy could also save the state more than $1.3 billion over a decade, and $818 million for New York City. 

Collecting residential waste and transporting it via trucks or barges to incinerators and landfills across the region is an expensive process—a city comptroller report found that it cost over $506 million to dispose of waste in 2024. 

The city’s Department of Sanitation is responsible for collecting and disposing of household waste. Private hauling companies handle commercial waste, the refuse from local businesses.

Waste management has long been an issue in the city, with some hauling companies accused of unsafe road maneuvers and safety violations. A resident was struck and killed by a private sanitation truck in Queens in 2019, and in the two preceding years trucks were involved in 73 serious crashes, according to a comptroller report. Haulers routinely crisscross the city, notching up miles in gasoline-powered trucks, to collect trash. 

“The current system is chaos,” said Justin Wood, the director of policy for the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which is on the steering committee of the Transform Don’t Trash NYC Coalition, a proponent of waste management reform. “We termed it a race to the bottom because every incentive in the current system is for these private companies to cut corners where they can.” 

In 2019, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio planned new commercial waste zones across the city. The new law mapped out 20 zones, with three waste haulers to serve each one. 

The rollout for these zones has been slow, with only one currently in operation in Queens. The plan aims to limit the miles travelled by private trash trucks and requires more stringent contracts with the city to enforce labor and safety standards.

“The [commercial waste zone] system enables the City to hold private waste haulers accountable to contracts that should include incentives for businesses and private haulers to increase recycling and composting, and to reduce waste at its source by reducing packaging and food waste,” Wood said in a later email.

Garbage is a messy political matter—and community groups have demanded more equitable distribution of how and where garbage is sorted and moved. 

There are six active marine transfer stations across the city, and numerous land-based waste transfer stations for trucks, where garbage is prepared for transportation. The facilities on land are often cited in environmental justice complaints by neighborhoods where local residents face disproportionate amounts of pollutants. 

The Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice has also noted that “over 75 percent of the city’s solid waste stream is processed in a handful of low-income communities of color in North Brooklyn, the South Bronx, Sunset Park, and Southeast Queens.”

“Over 30,000 tons per day of both residential and commercial waste is handled in the same handful of communities of color and low-income communities,” said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that has sought better city waste management since its founding in 1991. 

Trucks moving trash out of the city have contributed to air pollution by emitting the pollutant PM2.5, also called fine particulate matter. That is among the most harmful pollutants and has been linked to childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and premature mortality. 

According to city data, long-term exposure to the pollutant contributes to an estimated 2,000 excess deaths a year, or 1 in 25 deaths, in the city. A 2022 study by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit think tank, found that city residents of color are exposed to 5 percent more PM2.5 from diesel trucks than the average New Yorker. White residents are exposed to 10 percent less than the average, the study found.

Some neighborhoods also complain of rancid odors from the transfer facilities and poorly enclosed refuse.

In Queens, neighbors suffered for years with a “foul, rotten odor” from a waste transfer station in the Bricktown area of Jamaica. Residents sued the managers of the site and reached a settlement ensuring the companies would better control odors, noise, dust and stormwater discharges.

Bautista said progress on waste management in the city has been slow, and any bill that can help alleviate the pressure on these services is welcome. “Rome wasn’t built, or deconstructed, in a day,” he said.

Garbage is sorted and put in containers at waste transfer stations and then often transported to landfills. The state’s largest landfill—named Seneca Meadows—is almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty and is located in the bucolic Finger Lakes, a region whose economy relies on tourism and agriculture, including wine making.

According to Seneca Meadows’ annual report for 2023, around 24 percent of the waste in that landfill was sent from New York City, primarily from Queens and the Bronx. The landfill received a total of over 1.8 million tons of garbage that year, almost all from New York state.

Yvonne Taylor, co-founder of the nonprofit Seneca Lake Guardian, which monitors the trash issue, said the landfill offers a warning about environmental risks. “Our throwaway culture is causing everyday New Yorkers to literally poison ourselves,” Taylor said.

Landfills contribute to the rising temperatures endangering lives and property, too. In addition to carbon dioxide, they emit large amounts of the greenhouse gas methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the near-term. 

Seneca Meadows also impinges on day-to-day life, Taylor said. Some days, the stench from the landfill has been so strong that schoolchildren in surrounding towns like Waterloo and Seneca Falls don’t play outside during recess and businesses shut their windows. Taylor said some tourists have been surprised when they visit the region’s wineries on certain days and get a whiff of what’s in the air.

“People can’t enjoy their holidays,” Taylor said. 

On its website, Seneca Meadows argues that the landfill has had “no impact on local tourism or agritourism.” It points to a 2022 report by Oxford Economics, an economics advisory firm, that shows that Seneca County—where the landfill is located—has recovered well from the pandemic and has not seen a marked dip in visitor spending since.

Kyle Black, the district manager at Waste Connections Inc., the company that owns the landfill, did not answer questions about the site or the company’s plans for it. In an email, Black instead suggested visiting the landfill’s website “and or come to our site for a tour to see firsthand and educate yourself how our great team in fact successfully manages your solid waste in the most environmentally responsible way turning the waste into renewable energy that powers our local communities!!”

The Seneca Meadows landfill was set to close at the end of this year. Waste Connections has applied to expand it and continue to operate at least through 2040. According to a community fact sheet, the plan could increase the landfill’s height by almost 70 feet and would construct a landfill liner on 47 more acres—the equivalent of more than 35 football fields. 

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14062025/new-york-city-trash-problem-packaging-reduction-bill/