The Plastics Battle

It started here in Suffolk County in 1988: the passage of one of the first laws in the United States to ban plastic food packaging. Authored by Suffolk County Legislator Steven Englebright, prohibitions on polystyrene foam food packaging then spread from Suffolk County to cities, counties and other jurisdictions across the nation.

The ban was enacted when a Democratic-Republican coalition of especially environmentally committed legislators held a majority on the Suffolk Legislature in the 1980s.

The oil and gas industries and trade groups, led by the Society of the Plastics Industry, headquartered in Washington, D.C., fought the passage of the Suffolk law. They disputed it in court, and in 1990 it was overturned by a State Supreme Court justice, and subsequently by the Appellate Division.

Then, in 1992, New York State’s highest court, its Court of Appeals, reversed those rulings.

These vested interests, said Englebright at the time, “thought that if they could defeat this in Suffolk County, they could keep it from spreading. They wanted to snuff it out where it began.”

Still, two years later, there was a change in the political make-up of the Suffolk County Legislature. The Democratic-Republican coalition was replaced by a GOP majority.

And it eliminated the ban.

As it went decades ago in Suffolk County, it has gone with plastics on the state level in recent months.

“NY lawmakers fail to pass ambitious plastics EPR [Extended Producer Responsibility] bill,” declared the headline of the trade publication Plastic News in June.

The article, by its assistant managing editor, Steve Toloken, began: “For the second year in a row, a sweeping plastics packaging recycling and extended producer responsibility bill died in the final hours of New York State’s legislative session amid intense opposition from plastics and other business groups.

“The EPR bill, which would have mandated an incremental 30 percent reduction in plastic packaging over 12 years, failed to get a vote in the State Assembly June 17 after passing the State Senate by a 33-25 margin in late May,” it continued. “It’s the same fate the bill had last year, passing the Senate but stalling in the Assembly as the session ended.”

Its Senate sponsor, Peter Harckham, a Peekskill Democrat, “said the bill faced an unprecedented multimillion-dollar campaign from interest groups trying to stop it.

“‘In my seven years here, I have never seen anything like it. Over $2 million dollars spent to oppose this bill,’ said Harckham on the Senate floor during a May 28 debate. ‘This is Washington-style money,’ he said.”

Englebright, who went from being a leading environmental figure on the Suffolk Legislature to a leading environmental figure in the State Assembly — he served in it for 30 years and was chair of its Environmental Conservation Committee — knows Albany well.

Now, back as a member of the Suffolk County Legislature, Englebright, founding director of the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at Stony Brook University, where he has been a professor of geology, told me last week: “This is one of the major issues that will determine the health and well-being of millions of people, as well as whole ecosystems.

“Particles of plastic have been identified in the human bloodstream and in sexual organs of both men and women, and in brain tissue. We are just beginning to understand the potential of cancer and other diseases from inhaling microplastics,” said the Setauket Democrat.

“On the global scale, plastics have become so abundant that there is a patch of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean made up of floatable plastics that is as large as New England.”

“We’ve never seen anything like these effects from plastics packaging and careless use of plastics affecting many parts of our own biology and the ecosystem,” said Englebright.

“Plastics have been found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of an ocean on Earth, and in the highest mountains.”

He identified key culprits as “the oil and gas industries.” Said Englebright: “The same crowd that is largely responsible for overheating the global atmosphere, the catastrophic effects to our climate, the rise of sea level, the acidification of the oceans, the bleaching of coral reefs, the threat of changing ocean circulations — all that we are facing should we continue to use petrochemicals for energy — and arguing against the use of electric vehicles and pushing for expanded use of fossil fuels and elimination of wind energy projects.”

“Follow the Money” is the title of a report issued this month by the organization Beyond Plastics, based at Bennington College in Vermont, with a photograph of the New York State Capitol in Albany on its cover. Its subhead: “The David vs. Goliath Battle To Pass the New York Packaging Reduction Act and Recycling Infrastructure Act.”

It begins: “On one side is a coalition of environmental and public health organizations, paired with local governments that need financial relief from the mountains of waste companies are generating at an unsustainable pace. Local taxpayers are consequently saddled with skyrocketing disposal and recycling costs.

“On the other side are the giant businesses responsible for that waste: corporate behemoths like Amazon and McDonald’s, fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil and Shell, powerful chemical companies like Dow, plastic trade associations, and consumer goods brands like Kraft Heinz and Coca-Cola,” it goes on. “These corporations are hell-bent on defending the status quo — in other words, increasingly more plastic waste clogging landfills, burning in expensive waste incinerators, polluting our streets and parks, and perhaps most alarmingly contributing to plastic ending up in human blood, lungs, kidneys, placenta, breast milk, testicles, and brains.”

The bill that didn’t make it through the State Legislature — its Senate sponsor was Harckham, and in the Assembly, Deborah Glick, a Manhattan Democrat, “who chair the environmental conservation committees in their respective houses” — “would transform the way New Yorkers’ goods are packaged, reduce waste, reduce toxic chemical in packaging, and ease the burden on taxpayers,” the report said.

Citing polls, “Follow the Money” said: “New York voters support this bill across political parties … This widespread bipartisan support, it seems, did not have the political power to compete with industry giants.”