ICYMI: New NY Focus Story Shows Chemical Industry Spending Big Against Packaging Reduction Legislation, As Bill Gains Momentum
Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act on Codes Committee Agenda Today; Speaker Heastie Says Legislation Will Come to Floor Vote This Session
For Immediate Release: May 6, 2025
Contact: Marissa Solomon, marissa@pythiapublic.com, 734-330-0807
ALBANY, N.Y. — This morning, NY Focus published a new story digging into the massive spending and lobbying against the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464 Harckham/A1749 Glick). According to the story, “the bill was Albany’s most lobbied-on outside of the budget.” The American Chemistry Council spent $930,000 against the bill in 2024, and has already spent $797,000 this year.
Despite the opposition, the legislation continues to gain momentum. It’s on the agenda for a vote today in the New York State Assembly Codes Committee; and, as reported in yesterday’s Capitol Confidential, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie indicated that it will come to a floor vote in the Assembly this year.
Tomorrow at noon, more than 200 environmental leaders and advocates will rally in favor of the legislation at West Capitol Park.
Read the NY Focus story here and pasted below
Chemical Industry Redoubles Campaign Against New York Waste Bill
A national trade group has nearly doubled its spending in Albany since the packaging reduction bill was introduced and taken out attack ads on Democrats in swing districts.
By Colin Kinniburgh
You might have heard competing explanations for the soaring price of eggs in recent months: Bird flu. High demand. Price gouging.
Some of the world’s biggest chemical corporations are seizing on the price spikes to go after a different foe: a New York state bill that would force them to cut packaging waste.
“The price of eggs has more than doubled, and radical activists are pushing a law that will send grocery prices soaring even more!” reads the text of recent print ads, above a tearful cartoon egg.
The ads, paid for by the American Chemistry Council, have run in local papers since late March. They target freshman lawmakers who sponsor the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, legislation that would require companies to cut down on packaging and cover the costs of recycling or discarding what’s left. In the first months of this year, the bill was Albany’s most lobbied-on outside of the budget, drawing the firepower of household name brands including Coca Cola, Target, L’Oréal, and Kraft Heinz.
But none have opposed it as fiercely as the Chemistry Council, the national trade group for the chemical industry, whose members include Dow, DuPont, 3M, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other corporate giants. The group spent more than $930,000 lobbying Albany decisionmakers last year — nearly double what it spent in 2022, before lawmakers introduced the bill. That sum put it in the top 1 percent of lobbying spenders in the state, and it appears on track to spend at least as much this year.
The group now has six lobbying firms on its payroll in addition to its own staff. Its roster of lobbyists, as in past years, includes two former Democratic state senators, including one who chaired the chamber’s environment committee until 2022.
And in the past year, the Chemistry Council added a new tactic to its repertoire: a $250,000 election ad campaign around the packaging reduction bill, funneled through a third-party committee.
Further ads in local newspapers have urged constituents to lobby their lawmakers against the measure, claiming that it would lead to “higher prices” and “empty shelves.” In recent weeks, ads have targeted first-year assemblymembers in swing districts, warning that the “radical law” they’ve signed on to could increase grocery prices by more than $700 a year.
“Money is influence in Albany, and the amount of contact and influence that can be bought is huge with nearly a million dollars,” said Rachael Fauss, senior policy advisor at the government watchdog group Reinvent Albany.
The influence campaign has done little to dissuade the bill’s backers. Pete Harckham, its Senate sponsor and chair of the chamber’s environment committee, said the bill remains his top priority this year. He said that he and Assembly sponsor Deborah Glick already made significant revisions last year to address industry concerns and get the bill through the Senate. (It passed the chamber in the final days of the last legislative session, but did not reach a vote in the Assembly.) The bill is currently advancing through committees.
“Some we met with, you can tell they’re negotiating in good faith,” Harckham said. “And others just want to keep moving the goalposts.”
The American Chemistry Council did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Virtually everyone agrees that New York has a waste problem. The state’s landfills are overflowing, and New Yorkers are producing just as much trash as they were over a decade ago. Packaging and paper products make up about 40 percent of the state’s waste stream, according to official estimates, and most of them do not get recycled.
Advocates, lawmakers, and industry leaders broadly agree on how to solve the problem: an approach known as “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, which holds companies responsible for handling their products when they’re thrown away. Dozens of states, including New York, have applied this model to products ranging from batteries to carpets. Seven have applied versions of it to packaging.
The New York bill would do the same, and more. It would make certain companies — those earning more than $5 million or generating more than two tons of packaging waste per year — reimburse municipalities for the full cost of managing virtually all packaging waste.
It would require them to use more recyclable and recycled content in their packaging and, within 12 years, use 30 percent less packaging overall. The legislation would ban 14 kinds of toxic chemicals from packaging and wouldn’t count certain industry-favored practices, known as “chemical recycling” or “advanced recycling,” which use high heat or powerful chemicals to turn plastics into new materials or fuels, as recycling.
These provisions are broadly in line with how New York environmental officials want to tackle waste. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has been pushing for packaging EPR legislation for the last 15 years; its current waste plan, a non-binding set of guidelines published in 2023, also recommends legislation to ban toxic materials. And DEC regulations already bar chemical recycling processes, which generate significant amounts of hazardous waste and other pollutants, from the state’s definition of recycling.
Glick and Harckham’s bill would be the first in the country to mandate all of those policies in one fell swoop.
“This is the biggest environmental fight since fracking,” said Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and former regional administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency, referring to the state’s 2014 ban on certain kinds of gas drilling. The aim of the bill, in her words, is nothing less than to “solve the plastic pollution problem.”
While industry interests generally back EPR, they see Glick and Harckham’s bill as a dangerous overreach. They want the state to allow chemical recycling and regulate toxic chemicals separately, and object to a number of other provisions governing the waste stewardship program.
“We believe this legislation falls well short of our objective of having a fair, workable, consumer-protective packaging and material management system,” said Ken Pokalsky, vice president of government affairs at the Business Council of New York State, the state’s largest business group, in a statement earlier this year.
The Business Council, which has helped lead the opposition to the bill, did not respond to inquiries for this story except to send a series of previously published policy memos. A coalition letter from this February, signed by nearly 100 business interests ranging from the American Petroleum Institute to the New York State Brewers Association, said the bill “imposes unreasonable mandatory reductions in total packaging” and “sets up an unworkable timeframe for business compliance,” among other flaws.
In a new twist this year, an industry coalition led by the Business Council is championing EPR legislation of its own. The new Affordable Waste Reduction Act “will promote innovation in product design and material processing” without being overly prescriptive, they wrote last month in a letter signed by, among others, the Chemistry Council. The bill does not include chemical bans, a packaging reduction quota, or other hallmarks of Glick and Harckham’s bill.
So far, though, the business lobby has been more focused on opposing the older bill, with the Chemistry Council doing the heavy lifting.
The national trade group and its New York chapter have nearly 30 lobbyists working on their behalf this year, filings show — twice as many as in 2021–22. Among them are two former state senators hailing from Long Island: Craig Johnson, who lost his seat in 2010, and Todd Kaminsky, who chaired the Senate’s environment committee until abruptly leaving to work at the lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig in 2022. (Kaminsky declined to speak on the record; Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.)
The Chemistry Council has boosted its campaign spending, too. Last August, it gave $250,000 to an independent expenditure committee called Jobs New York, which is managed by the Business Council, placing it in the top ranks of New York political donors. The chemicals group has been spending in New York elections since at least 2004, records show, but its largest contribution until last year was $25,000.
In the months after the Chemistry Council’s donation, filings show, Jobs New York paid a campaign consultancy nearly $200,000 for mailers backing 10 mostly Democratic candidates, including three senators who had voted against the packaging bill earlier in the year.
That spring, the Chemistry Council sponsored ads that ran in local papers targeting Harckham and other backers of his bill. It disclosed nearly $400,000 in media expenses in its regular lobbying filings in the first half of last year.
“Radical activists are about to ruin summer BBQ season,” the ads warned late last May, as lawmakers headed into the final weeks of the legislative session. (Neither the Chemistry Council nor the Business Council answered New York Focus’s questions about their advertising efforts.)
The Chemistry Council has renewed those efforts this year, spending another $207,000 on ads and social media over just the last two months, according to its latest filing.
Freshman assemblymember Rebecca Kassay, of Long Island, said she was disappointed to see industry groups launch ads against her before she had even had a chance to speak with them about the issue.
“I just find it very interesting that their first step is to take an ad out against someone,” Kassay said.
The ads claim that the packaging bill will drive household grocery costs up by as much as $730 a year and hurt small businesses; they do not cite a source for this figure, and the Chemistry Council did not provide one when asked.
There are conflicting studies on the cost associated with EPR measures. Kassay cited a recent report from Beyond Plastics which found that the bill could save municipalities — and therefore taxpayers — $1.3 billion in trash collection costs over 10 years. Those savings are a key reason that the New York State Association of Counties, New York City, and other localities are backing the bill.
Critics say that tally doesn’t account for higher prices that New Yorkers could see in stores as waste management costs are shifted to businesses. A York University whitepaper commissioned by the Business Council questions the idea that municipalities would pass on savings to taxpayers, and estimates that stringent EPR legislation could cost New York households as much as $200 a year.
Beyond Plastics, meanwhile, has circulated analyses from Consumer Reports and Columbia University suggesting that EPR would have little to no impact on consumer prices. (None of the competing studies were peer reviewed.) Enck suggested that the imperative to reduce packaging could actually save businesses money; some companies are already considering slimming down their packaging to cut costs in response to new tariffs.
But many businesses are also wary of being forced to ditch packaging materials they’ve counted on for years and come up with new ones. Major food corporations have warned they might take products like hot dogs and cream cheese off New York shelves if the legislation passes
That message returned in the recent ads targeting Kassay and Assemblymember Paula Elaine Kay, a fellow newly elected Democrat in a purple district.
Kassay said the ads don’t seem to have swayed voters. A statewide Siena poll conducted in March found that 73 percent of voters, including 60 percent of Republicans, support the idea of requiring large companies to reduce packaging waste. And Kassay said she hadn’t heard from any constituents opposing the bill since the ads ran.
If anything, she said, the ads may have done some unintended publicity for her side. “One constituent said he would gladly pay a few pennies more at the grocery store if it meant taking toxic chemicals off of the packaging his food is in,” Kassay said.
She said she was still open to hearing from industry groups directly about their concerns with the bill.
“I invite the American Chemistry Council and anyone to save themselves the money and just call my office,” she said.
###