Two Years in a Row, New York State Assembly Fails to Pass Widely Popular Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act
For Immediate Release: June 18, 2025
Contacts:
Marissa Solomon, marissa@pythiapublic.com, (734) 330-0807
Judith Enck, judithenck@bennington.edu, (518) 605-1770
ALBANY, N.Y. — For the second year in a row, the Democratic supermajority-controlled New York state Assembly failed to vote on the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (A1749 Glick) despite having enough votes to pass. Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics president and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, issued the following statement:
“While President Trump is launching a full-on assault on the environment, the New York state Assembly sided with the multibillion dollar companies pumping toxic chemicals and microplastics into our environment and our bodies. It’s deeply disappointing that we’re in this position again, with municipalities and taxpayers cheated out of hundreds of millions in cost savings for another year. New Yorkers didn’t vote for any of this, and they deserve better.
“Thank you to our extraordinary bill sponsors, Assemblywoman Deborah Glick and Senator Pete Harckham, who fought relentlessly to pass the legislation this year. Our fight continues. Plastic pollution isn't going away, and neither are we.”
Enck went on to say: “There was a time when previous Speakers of the Assembly stood up for protecting public health and the environment. That time has passed. There has always been special interest opposition to effective environmental bills, but this year, Speaker Heastie let those special interests win by not allowing the packaging-reduction bill to come up for a vote and blocking every major piece of environmental legislation. During this entire legislative session, the state Senate passed many environmental bills and the state Assembly only passed one watered-down version of the NY HEAT Act. The Trump administration is attacking our most basic environmental protections; Speaker Heastie’s response is to do nothing.”
The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act is widely popular. According to an April Siena Poll, a bipartisan 73% think big companies should be required to reduce packaging on their products. The New York State Conference of Mayors and Municipal Officials, the New York State Association of Counties, and the New York Association of Towns all support the bill because of the cost savings it would pass onto municipalities and taxpayers. Leading environmental justice groups and more than 300 organizations and businesses took action to pass the legislation.
BACKGROUND
The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (S1464 Harckham/A1749 Glick) will transform the way our goods are packaged. It will dramatically reduce waste and ease the burden on taxpayers by making companies, not consumers, cover the cost of managing packaging. The bill will:
Reduce plastic packaging by 30% incrementally over 12 years;
By 2052, all packaging — including plastic, glass, cardboard, paper, and metal — must meet a recycling rate of 75% (with incremental benchmarks until then);
Prohibit 17 of packaging’s worst toxic chemicals and materials, including all PFAS chemicals, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), lead, and mercury;
Prohibit the harmful process known as chemical recycling to be considered real recycling;
Establish a modest fee on packaging paid by product producers, with new revenue going to local taxpayers; and
Establish a new Office of Inspector General to ensure that companies fully comply with the new law.
A new report from Beyond Plastics "Projected Economic Benefits of the New York Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act" shows how New Yorkers would save $1.3 billion in just one decade after the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act becomes law. These savings would come from the avoided costs of waste management when there’s less waste to manage, and they don’t even include the funds that would be brought in after placing a fee on packaging paid by product producers.
Plastics and Climate
Plastic production is warming the planet four times faster than air travel, and it’s only going to get worse with plastic production expected to double in the next 20 years. Plastic is made from fossil fuels and contains 16,000 chemicals, many of them known to be harmful to humans and even more untested for their safety. Most plastics are made out of ethane, a byproduct of fracking. In 2020, plastic’s climate impacts amounted to the equivalent of nearly 49 million cars on the road, according to a conservative estimate by Material Research L3C. And that’s not including the carbon footprint associated with disposing of plastic.
Plastics and Health
Less than 6% of plastic in the United States actually gets recycled, and only 9% of all the plastic waste ever generated, globally, has been recycled. The rest ends up burned at incinerators, buried in landfills, or polluting rivers and the ocean — an estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean every year.
Plastic is being measured everywhere, and microplastics are entering our soil, food, water, and air. Scientists estimate people consume, on average, hundreds of thousands of microplastics per year, and these particles have been found in human placenta, breast milk, stool, blood, lungs, and more.
Scientific research continues to find that the microplastics problem is worse than previously thought: New research in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that microplastics are linked to increased heart attacks, strokes and premature deaths. Another study from Columbia University found that bottled water can contain hundreds of thousands of plastic fragments.
Why Chemical Recycling Isn’t a Solution
Because plastics recycling is a failure, the plastics and petrochemical industries are now pushing a pseudo-solution: chemical recycling, or “advanced recycling.” This is a polluting process that uses high heat or chemicals to turn plastic waste into fossil fuels or feedstocks to produce new plastic products. It’s a dangerous distraction that’s allowing companies to exponentially increase the amount of plastic — and greenhouse gases — they put into the world. Learn more from Beyond Plastics’s report, “Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception.” These New York bills do not ban chemical recycling but simply do not allow chemical recycling to count as real recycling.
About Beyond Plastics
Launched in 2019, Beyond Plastics pairs the wisdom and experience of environmental policy experts with the energy and creativity of grassroots advocates to build a vibrant and effective movement to end plastic pollution. Using deep policy and advocacy expertise, Beyond Plastics is building a well-informed, effective movement seeking to achieve the institutional, economic, and societal changes needed to save our planet and ourselves, from the negative health, climate, and environmental impacts for the production, usage, and disposal of plastics.
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