paying it forward
O
by elizabeth royte
ver the past 11 years, Mayor
Michael Bloomberg has helped plant hundreds of thousands of trees in
New York City, reduced indoor air pollution by banning smoking in restaurants and bars, and created more than 350 miles of bike lanes in the five boroughs—all boons to the environment. But he’s never done all that much to reduce the quan-
tity of waste that the city sends to landfills. Until this past spring, that is, when the outgoing mayor 2 6 onearth
fall 2013
(he steps down on January 1) announced a major expansion of the types of plastics New Yorkers can toss into their recycling bins. Yesterday it was only narrow-necked bottles; today it’s any rigid plastics, including clamshell-type containers, clothes hangers, even toys. Hallelujah. Compared with other American metropolises, New York’s recycling rate has been pretty anemic. At last check, the city was recovering only 15 percent of all the potentially recyclable material in its waste stream; the national average is 34.7 percent. That’s why so many of us were pleased by the mayor’s announcement. With a stroke of the pen, Bloomberg assured that an additional 50,000 tons of plastics would be delivered to recycling companies annually. Moreover, the simplicity of the city’s larger recycling message—“Just throw everything into the bin”—seemed likely to foster a greater degree of compliance, netting plastics processors even more of the materials they covet most: those narrow-necked bottles that are typically made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or high-density polyethylene (HDPE). But then my not-so-inner skeptic started to pipe up. Wasn’t it possible, I wondered, that this expansion would encourage even more consumption of single-use throwaway plastics? Would consumers who might once have felt a guilty pang when tipping their takeout containers into the trash now feel that by recycling those containers, they were somehow solving our plastics problem? Plastic, after all, is made out of nonrenewable resources—oil and natural gas—extracted at high cost to human and environmental health. Globally, the plastics packaging industry grew an average of 7.2 percent a year between 2001 and 2010, with most of that growth taking place in developing nations. It all leads to a question that doesn’t get asked enough: who should be responsible for what happens to consumer products and packaging when we’re through with them? For the most part, our current system lets the producers of single-use plastics off the hook, allowing companies to offload costs related to the disposal of ever more waste— from sticky Frappuccino lids to salad bar boxes and single-use water bottles—onto taxpayers, who pay for their collection and transfer to recycling facilities. Or, increasingly, to landfills, in the event that these materials fail to find an end market. (China, which has been buying about 50 percent of our exported recyclables, has begun turning away loads of them because they’re contaminated with food or other garbage, or mixed with non-recyclable plastics.) But things may be changing. Recently, more and more states, cities, and concerned individuals have begun demanding that the producers of consumer goods take greater responsibility for their products at the end of their useful lives. Proponents of the strategy known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) press governments to shift the costs of collecting and recycling products and packaging onto those who generated them in the first place. Under an EPR framework, manufacturers and brand owners finance the collection and recycling or disposal of packaging materials, hazardous landfill items (such as mercury-containing compact fluorescent bulbs and thermometers), and hard-to-recycle goods like mattresses. Won’t these fees be folded directly into consumer price tags? They might. But that’s actually the beauty of the EPR system: it sends a clear economic signal to both companies and consumers regarding
illustration by mary lynn blasutta
think again