NEW YORK — First, it was once plastic luggage; now, New York state is coming after plastic packaging.
“We really should be doing everything we can to prevent plastic waste,” stated Skye Smith, common supervisor of Precycle in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
You would possibly not to find any plastic in any respect inside of Precycle; it is a zero-waste grocery retailer.
“We want this to be what a grocery store is in the future,” Smith stated.
That’s simply what some New York lawmakers are hoping as they push a bill that might greatly minimize down on plastic packaging in shipments and on retailer cabinets statewide.
It’s known as the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, which seeks to the minimize the volume of plastic packaging New York consumes in part over the following 12 years.
“We have a solid waste crisis, we have a plastic pollution crisis,” stated Kate Donovan, regional lead northeast of environmental well being at Natural Resources Defense Council.
Donovan says the bill will get rid of what is known as “problematic plastics,” together with banning plastic that has poisonous chemical compounds in it.
“There’s lot of different plastics that we use currently, many of which cannot be recycled effectively or recycled at all,” Donovan stated.
The bill basically penalizes plastic manufacturers, charging massive production corporations like Amazon, Walmart and Costco.
If that is handed into legislation, it will give state regulators the facility to advantageous a trade as much as $1,000 according to day for each and every violation.
But representatives for small companies worry this might result in an building up in transport prices.
“That’s going to be like another burden to our store owners. They’re going to impose more cost for the products that we use,” stated Francisco Marte, a spokesperson for the Bodega and Small Business Association.
The Plastics Industry Association despatched us a observation announcing partially, “This legislation as written is impractical and unworkable” and “it needs a lot of work before it is ready for primetime.”
The bill is now one step nearer to changing into a legislation, handed the meeting’s environmental committee a couple of weeks in the past.