A Senate panel on Thursday postponed action on a controversial bill, opposed by NJBIA, which requires producers of packaging products, and manufacturers that use these products, to implement stewardship plans aimed at reducing the amount of packaging disposed in landfills.
NJBIA Deputy Chief Government Affairs Officer Ray Cantor said S-3398, known as the Packaging Product Stewardship Act, may be well-intentioned, but is overly burdensome, impractical, and unworkable in its current form.
“We could get behind a good extended producer responsibility (EPR) bill, but unfortunately this is not it,” Cantor said prior to the start of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee meeting, where the legislation had been scheduled for a vote.
Senator Bob Smith (D-17), the committee chair and sponsor of the bill, announced Thursday that he was postponing action on the legislation until Jan. 6 to address the feedback the committee had received from stakeholders affected by the bill.
“The more we work on it, the more complicated it gets,” Smith told the overflow crowd as the committee meeting got underway. “So, we’re going to look at some more issues.”
In its current form, the legislation would require certain manufacturers and distributors of products that utilize packaging to adopt and implement plans to decrease the amount of packaging that is disposed of as solid waste, and to pay an annual surcharge to the state, the proceeds of which would be used to improve the state’s recycling system.
Cantor said the legislation mandates unrealistic packaging reductions and ignores 40 years of work and systems that have made New Jersey one of the most successful recycling states in the nation.
“It would essentially create a ban of the advanced recycling of plastics, the most promising new technology to recycle materials that currently are thrown away,” Cantor said.
According to the language of the bill, any stewardship plan to help manage, collect, transport, recycle and reuse packaging products would need to be approved by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
“Beyond the burdensome provisions of the bill, we strongly question whether DEP would even have the capacity to review and approve such plans,” Cantor said. “Items that have long been in the queue, such as food waste recycling regulations and dirty dirt regulations, have not been proposed, much less implemented. We also still have issues with New Jersey’s plastic bag ban.”
Cantor also noted that the definition of recycling in the bill excludes any chemical conversion process, commonly known as advanced recycling. This is important, he said, because it would effectively ban the innovation of advanced recycling methods, such as using high temperatures and pressure to break down chemicals in plastics and return them to their base make up to be reused as new plastics.
“By excluding that chemical conversion process from the definition of recycling, it eliminates any incentive to use advanced recycling as it would not count toward recycling mandates and reductions in packaging,” Cantor said.
“The business community is constantly working to reduce the amount of packaging they use and finding ways to recycle or reuse materials,” Cantor said. “We have seen workable EPR laws in other states that we could support. But unfortunately, this is not it.”
