In general, plastic bag bans aren’t perfect, wrote policy analyst John Hite for the Conservation Law Foundation, but they’re a good start. Hite pointed out that, even in studies showing that plastic bag bans increased purchases of thicker trash bags and paper bags, the bans consistently decreased the overall use of single-use plastic bags.
Tom Irwin with the Conservation Law Foundation endorsed the idea. He noted the Legislature two decades ago set a goal of reducing solid waste by 40 percent and put landfills at the bottom of the waste “hierarchy.” “Twenty years later we have not achieved the solid waste reduction goal and we are still operating on a disposal model and relying heavily on landfills,” Irwin said.
“Plastic producers have been given a free pass to pollute our communities for far too long at taxpayer expense,” said John Hite, Zero Waste Policy Analyst at CLF. “Single-use packaging has upended recycling and filled our oceans, communities, and landfills with plastic pollution. LD2104 will require packaging companies to deal with the mess they’ve made and create products that don’t wreak havoc on our recycling systems and environment.”
“The last thing New Hampshire needs is another landfill,” said Tom Irwin, Vice President and Director of CLF New Hampshire. “The Department of Environmental Services came to the right conclusion: Casella’s proposed expansion would violate important state policy and is not in the public interest. Instead of expanding a polluting landfill, we must focus on reducing waste and ramping up recycling and compost efforts.”
“Fossil fuel companies have created the plastic crisis at our expense,” said Brad Campbell, President of Conservation Law Foundation. “Beyond littering our streets and waters, plastic production harms human health, destroys our climate and hobbles the budgets of cities and towns. This groundbreaking federal legislation will hold these large corporations accountable in cleaning up the damage they’ve done.”
Maine legislators are working to shift soaring recycling costs back where they belong: onto the producers of unmanageable plastic packaging.
Over the years, Pecci said many communities in the state have gone to a single-stream recycling system. And those streams have increasingly captured items that either are not recyclable or for which there is no recycling market, such as coffee-cup lids. “What happened is we degraded the quality of the material,” Pecci said. “The cleaner and more sorted something is, the more value it is going to have.”
At the corner of Allens and Thurbers avenues in Providence, Rhode Island, sits a less-than-four-acre lot that could soon be home to a massive garbage depot. The proposal has nearby residents in South Providence and Washington Park worried and angry – and with good reason. These communities are already burdened by daily pollution from other nearby industrial facilities.
Despite many good intentions, curbside recycling has turned out to be a disaster. But that doesn’t mean recycling is dead. We have solutions. One of the best systems for recycling our plastic, glass, and aluminum containers is the bottle return program, also known as the “bottle bill” or deposit-return.
Although some New England states pioneered the bottle return system, they have since fallen behind. But New England can improve its recycling by updating or adopting bottle return systems in each state. This would help reduce litter in our neighborhoods, parks, and waterways; it would keep recyclable material out of landfills and incinerators; and it would lift some recycling costs off of communities.
