The article in the url below contains some rare positive news on the recycling front. Specifically, it reports on a Maine law, passed over the summer, that seeks to shift the cost of recycling to the companies that produce the packaging:
"Recycling … was a headache for municipal governments even in good times. And, only a small amount was actually getting recycled. Then, five years ago, China stopped buying most of America's recycling, and dozens of cities across the United States suspended or weakened their recycling programs. Now, Maine has implemented a new law that could transform the way packaging is recycled by requiring manufacturers, rather than taxpayers, to cover the cost. Nearly a dozen states have been considering similar regulations and Oregon is about to sign its own version in coming weeks."
The difference is where the burden for funding the recycling lies – not on the commodities market, as previously, but on the firms that previously benefited from the externalized costs of cleaning up the packaging they created:
"Essentially, these programs work by charging producers a fee based on a number of factors, including the tonnage of packaging they put on the market. Those fees are typically paid into a producer responsibility organization, a nonprofit group contracted and audited by the state. It reimburses municipal governments for their recycling operations with the fees collected from producers."
Although these laws are potentially ground-breaking in the U.S., they are not new, or even particularly innovative, when you consider where other countries are on this issue. What they are, however, is effective:
"Nearly all European Union member states, as well as Japan, South Korea and five Canadian provinces, have laws like these and they have seen their recycling rates soar and their collection programs remain resilient. … Ireland's recycling rate for plastics and paper products, for instance, rose from 19 percent in 2000 to 65 percent in 2017. Nearly every E.U. country with such programs has a recycling rate between 60 and 80 percent, according to an analysis by the Product Stewardship Institute. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, America's recycling rate was 32 percent, a decline from a few years earlier."
Of course, that does not mean they are popular with the firms that are now being expected to clean up the mess they have been making:
"In Maine, the packaging industry supported a competing bill that would have given producers more oversight of the program. It also would have exempted packaging for a range of pharmaceutical products and hazardous substances, including paint thinners, antifreeze and household cleaning products. One of the industry's main objections to the bill that ultimately passed was that it gave the government too much authority and left the industry with not enough voice in the process."
No doubt, the authors of the bill might have noted that this was the whole point of the exercise, since self-regulation has clearly not been sufficient to produce meaningful action:
"There are concerns that a growing market for plastics could drive demand for oil, contributing to the release of greenhouse gas emissions precisely at a time when the world needs to drastically cut emissions. By 2050, the plastics industry is expected to consume 20 percent of all the oil produced. The oil industry, concerned about declining demand as the world moves toward electric cars and away from fossil fuels, has pivoted toward making more plastic — spending more than $200 billion on chemical and plastic manufacturing plants in the United States. Vast amounts of plastic waste are exported to Africa and South Asia, where they often end up in dumps or in waterways and oceans."
The result is what has become known as extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs for packaging products, and they can be extensive:
"In Maine, packaging products covered by the law make up as much as 40 percent of the waste stream. … [Maine is] requiring producers to cover 100 percent of its municipalities' recycling costs. Oregon, by contrast, will require producers to cover around 28 percent of the costs of recycling, with municipalities continuing to cover the rest."
And, encouragingly, some companies are seeing these legislative efforts as an opportunity to innovate, whereas previously they might have resisted or simply passed on the additional costs to customers:
"Some major consumer-product companies have begun voicing support for policies like these. In 2016, Greenpeace obtained internal documents from Coca-Cola Europe, which depicted extended producer responsibility as a policy that the company was fighting. In a sign of change, this spring, more than 100 multinational companies, including Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Walmart, signed a pledge committing to support E.P.R. policies."
Take care
David
David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (5e)
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Maine Law Could Help Revive Recycling
By Winston Choi-Schagrin
July 23, 2021
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
B1, B3
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/climate/maine-recycling-law-EPR.html
