Chemical Industry Steps Up Lobbying as New York Weighs Major Waste Bill

Trade groups are spending big to fight legislation that would restrict single-use packaging and bar their preferred “chemical recycling” technologies.

Source: Chemical Industry Steps Up Lobbying as New York… | New York Focus

CHEMICAL RECYCLING’ BATTLE

The American Chemistry Council, the chief trade group for the us chemical industry and a leading opponent of the packaging bill, is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-powered lobbyists. Among their ranks are Todd Kaminsky, the former Senate environment committee chair who abruptly resigned last year to take a job at the firm Greenberg Traurig, and Craig Johnson, another former state senator. Johnson, who lost his seat in 2010, was a backer of the Republican-allied Independent Democratic Conference and now runs his own boutique lobbying firm, Long Point Advisors.

The Chemistry Council is paying Greenberg Traurig and Johnson’s firm $60,000 each to lobby on its behalf for the duration of the legislative session, filings show. It has also hired the MirRam Group and the one-man shop jem Associates at annual rates of $165,000 and $35,000, respectively. And the trade group has three of its own in-house lobbyists in Albany, adding up to nine lobbyists and at least $200,000 in spending so far this year.

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In a joint memo issued this week with more than 75 other companies and organizations, the Chemistry Council wrote that the pending waste bill’s definitions are “overly restrictive” and will stifle nascent recycling technologies. That’s a reference to “chemical recycling,” a controversial suite of technologies that use high heat or other processes to break down scrap plastics into their original molecules and transform them into new plastics.

New chemical recycling facilities around the country “are expected to recycle up to 9 billion pounds of material per year,” and New York would close itself off from this market if it adopts the current bill, the industry memo says.

Environmentalists broadly oppose chemical recycling because of the air pollution and often hazardous waste it creates. Harckham and Glick’s far-reaching bill would prohibit the practice, as well as ban certain toxic substances from packaging. It would also require companies to reduce total packaging by 30 percent within a decade, and gradually increase the amount of recycled material in their packaging, along with a host of other measures.

The bill’s producer-pays approach is known as “extended producer responsibility” (epr), and New York already applies it to products including prescription drugs, electronic waste, and, now, carpets. But packaging is a much bigger fish. As of 2018, packaging accounted for close to a third of the waste stream nationwide, federal data show. About half of that got recycled — mainly cardboard. Plastic, the second largest category, mostly went to landfills, where it will sit for hundreds of years.