This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
NEW YORK STATE · May 29, 2025
As Albany Debates Plastics Crackdown, Industry Pushes Softer Alternative
The chemical industry is pushing to replace a sweeping plastics bill with a more business-friendly alternative.
By Colin Kinniburgh , New York Focus
Business groups have made no secret of their opposition to a major waste reduction bill currently advancing through the halls of Albany.
Like last year, dozens of industry interests have been lobbying against the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, a wide-reaching proposal to curb plastic pollution at its source. But this year, business interests aren’t just in opposition mode. They say they have a constructive solution.
A coalition led by the Business Council, the state’s leading business group, is rallying behind a bill introduced this February that proponents say would cut waste without hamstringing companies with mandates. Like the longer-standing bill, it would establish a version of “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, a policy that holds companies responsible for handling their products when they’re thrown away. But the new Affordable Waste Reduction Act shuns many of the more prescriptive elements of the older bill, which business groups say will drive products off shelves, businesses out of New York, and prices up for consumers.
“Instead of being a situation where business stomped its feet and said, ‘We’re not going to do this, we’re going to try to block this, we’re going to try to do whatever we can to stop it,’ we came up with something that we felt was reasonable,” said Paul Zuber, executive vice president at the Business Council.
The bill’s introduction comes amid a multimillion-dollar, years-long push by the chemical industry and wider business lobby to advance their preferred solutions to New York’s increasingly untenable waste problem.
That lobbying campaign has included taking lawmakers to tour a North Carolina plant that the plastics industry has presented as a showcase for a new generation of recycling technologies — even as it’s racked up a string of environmental violations. Several assemblymembers, including sponsors of the corporate-backed EPR bill and a separate bill to promote industry-favored “chemical recycling” technologies, have toured the plant, New York Focus has learned.
Backers of the longer-standing waste bill, sponsored by Senator Pete Harckham and Assemblymember Deborah Glick, see its new rival as yet another attempt to kill their own.
“It’s clearly designed to derail the good bill,” said Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and former regional administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency. “They know their bad bill is not going to pass, but they want to put a stick in the spoke of the wheel.”
The original packaging waste bill — the one backed by environmentalists — passed the Senate on Wednesday for the second year in a row, with the support of all but a few Democrats. It has yet to reach a vote in the Assembly, but Speaker Carl Heastie has said he expects it to this year. The state already restricts high-heat chemical recycling technologies, treating them as incineration.
The chemical industry and its allies have sought to stave off further regulation with sheer lobbying might. With the Affordable Waste Reduction Act, they are trying to change the conversation.
Like its older rival, the bill would require companies that sell packaged products to pay fees based on the amount of packaging waste they generate. A new organization, managed by these companies, would oversee the fee collection and work to boost recycling rates.
The new legislation, though, would not set fixed targets for companies to reduce their packaging; it wouldn’t ban various toxic ingredients from packaging; it would leave the door open to chemical recycling; and it would largely exempt waste from businesses, which accounts for about a fifth of all waste statewide.
Oil giants ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as the chemicals arm of Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, have joined the ranks of industry interests lobbying on the bill this year.
The Business Council has taken credit for crafting the bill in dialogue with its Senate sponsor, Monica Martinez, saying that it was modeled after a similar bill signed by Minnesota governor Tim Walz. (The Minnesota bill does require regulators there to set targets for reducing total packaging.)
“We met with Senator Martinez, probably in the early part of the year… and began talking to her about having an EPR bill that was more balanced in its approach,” Zuber told New York Focus this month. “This bill that we pattern after Minnesota and the Walz bill was something that was a little bit more workable for business. And so she was willing to agree with it.”
Close to 40 companies and business groups, including the American Chemistry Council, the top trade group for the US chemical industry, have endorsed the bill.
Martinez declined to be interviewed for this story. In response to written questions, she denied that the Business Council wrote the bill.
“I met with a diversity of stakeholders, including the Business Council to find solutions that best match New York’s unique needs and legacy of environmental leadership,” Martinez said in an email. “To say any specific group developed the bill for me, however, is not accurate.”
The bill’s Assembly sponsor, Chantel Jackson, declined an interview, and her office did not respond to written questions.
Jackson’s office hosted a virtual briefing on the bill in late March, where she gave brief remarks followed by presentations from Ken Pokalsky, vice president of the Business Council, and a lobbyist for the pesticide and garden care company ScottsMiracle-Gro. Besides lawmakers and their staff, at least three lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council were in attendance, including former state senators Craig Johnson and Todd Kaminsky. A New York Focus reporter attempted to attend the briefing but was kicked out before the presentation began. (Kaminsky declined to comment; Johnson did not respond to inquiries.)
In the briefing, Jackson framed the bill as a common-sense solution to New York’s waste problem.
“When we started creating packaging and stuff, we never knew how much consumption we would have. And now we’re in a space where we have to manage it, and that’s what this bill is attempting to do,” she said, according to a recording obtained by New York Focus.
The bill is beginning to pick up cosponsors. Three of the sponsors, including Martinez, received support in their reelection campaigns last fall from an independent expenditure committee run by the Business Council and funded by the Chemistry Council, as New York Focus recently reported.
Assemblymember Carrie Woerner, one of the three recipients and an early sponsor of the new bill, said she sees the proposal as a practical path toward reducing plastic pollution. (Like the other incumbents who received campaign support from the industry group, she said she wasn’t aware of the effort.) She argued that the timelines set out for companies to reduce their packaging in Harckham and Glick’s bill don’t match those of other states “and would potentially limit brands being sold in New York.”
“I want us to adopt an EPR program, and I want it to be one that can be implemented by national brands as well as local producers,” she wrote in an email. “Because a bill that can’t be effectively implemented is not one that will successfully create the outcome we need — less plastics in the environment.”
Woerner also said she favors a “technology neutral” approach that doesn’t stifle potential future technologies to reprocess hard-to-recycle plastics in an environmentally sound way.
“Plastics is plan B for big oil, and they don’t want a state the size of New York doing a bill that actually reduces plastic production.”
—Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics
Harckham and Glick’s bill would bar the state from counting chemical recycling techniques as recycling, severely restricting their use. Martinez and Jackson’s leaves the issue open-ended.
A third bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman and Senator Jeremy Cooney, would directly promote chemical recycling by exempting facilities that use the technologies from the environmental rules that apply to waste sites. It’s in the mold of industry-backed legislation passed in 25 other states that lightens regulations on the processes by classifying them as manufacturing.
Hyndman told New York Focus that she took up the bill because the waste crisis touches her own backyard. She said that she has sought for years to reduce the constant truck traffic to two waste disposal sites in her Queens district, to no avail, and that the state needs “stopgaps” until it works out a longer-term fix to plastic pollution.
Her chemical recycling bill has gained little traction since it was first introduced in 2022.
In that time, Hyndman has received $3,000 in campaign contributions from the Chemistry Council and its New York affiliate, records show. Cooney and Martinez have both received more than $1,000 from the group in that period. Hyndman, Cooney, and Martinez all said the donations had no bearing on their legislative work.
The direct campaign donations are dwarfed by the amounts that the Chemistry Council has lately spent on independent expenditures and lobbying.
“Sadly, this is how Albany works,” said Rachael Fauss, senior policy advisor at the government watchdog group Reinvent Albany. The chemical industry’s various efforts to “buy influence” in Albany are all part of a playbook, she said: “It’s the way business is done.”
There’s a lot riding on the chemical recycling fight. The issue has cropped up in Albany waste debates before — nearly sinking an EPR bill for carpets in 2023 — but packaging is the biggest battleground yet.
The technologies have become a flashpoint because the fossil fuel industry holds them out as its future — and environmentalists see them as an excuse to keep producing harmful plastics, which continue to go overwhelmingly unrecycled despite decades of industry promises to the contrary. Oil giants ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as the chemicals arm of Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, have joined the ranks of industry interests lobbying on the packaging reduction bill this year.
“Plastics is plan B for big oil, and they don’t want a state the size of New York doing a bill that actually reduces plastic production,” Enck said.
The chemical industry’s efforts to sell Albany lawmakers on their answers to plastic pollution have taken lawmakers hundreds of miles from the state capitol, to North Carolina, where one chemical recycling company operates its first and so far only plant.
Braven Environmental, whose corporate office is in Westchester, converts waste plastics into a mix of fuel and feedstocks for new materials using a high-heat process called “pyrolysis.” New York lawmakers have toured the plant on at least two occasions since 2023.
Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman and a member of her staff visited in the fall of that year, accompanied by the Chemistry Council’s top New York lobbyist, Margaret Gorman, and Craig Johnson, the former state senator now lobbying on the group’s behalf, according to a LinkedIn post from one of the plant’s owners.
Hyndman told New York Focus that several of her Assembly colleagues visited the plant more recently, including Jackson, Catalina Cruz, Jonathan Rivera, and Stefani Zinerman. (Cruz, Rivera, and Zinerman did not respond to requests for comment.)
“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Hyndman said. “We have over 8,000 pieces of legislation. It was a chance for them to see exactly why I support it and why I think New York should be open to this industry.”
Asked about the visits, Braven CEO James Simon declined to provide details, saying in an email only that the company “has hosted government officials and industry experts from a number of states. All at their own expense.”
Hyndman said that, when she visited, she was impressed by what the company was able to achieve in a modest facility.
“I was expecting a huge place with smokestacks and no one around for miles, but this facility was right next to a college and an elementary school, and I would never have thought it was an advanced recycling facility,” she said.
Environmental regulators, and a 2023 investigation by the Intercept, have painted a less flattering picture. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Braven facility has operated in “significant violation” of federal hazardous waste rules continuously for the last three years. (“We continue to work with [regulators] on resolution of the one outstanding remediation item,” Simon told New York Focus.)
The Braven plant is just one of many chemical plants that has offered tours to lawmakers in recent years. The Chemistry Council boasts that, last year alone, its members held more than 100 tours with elected officials in 36 states.
“It’s important policy makers see for themselves that advanced recycling is a vital manufacturing activity which supports local jobs and offers a critical piece of the solution to effective plastics management,” Chemistry Council spokesperson Andrew Fasoli told New York Focus. “Facility tours help educate policymakers, address misconceptions, and provide firsthand insight into these operations.”
With pressure mounting as the legislative session enters its final weeks, industry lobbyists and their allies are hammering home a popular theme: affordability.
The two sides of Albany’s waste debate have traded dueling studies over whether the more expansive bill would drive up costs for consumers. Its supporters say New Yorkers would see little to no price hikes on store shelves — and could actually save money, taking into account the money that municipalities save on waste collection. Business groups estimate that the measure could cost consumers up to $200 a year.
Backers of the new bill have highlighted California’s backtracking on implementation of its own far-reaching waste bill, which requires companies to reduce single-use plastic packaging by 25 percent and make all single-use packaging recyclable or compostable within a decade — a stricter timeline than the one Harckham and Glick’s bill would set in New York. Governor Gavin Newsom ordered regulators to overhaul their plans to meet the law after an official report found it could cost households as much as $330 annually.
“I represent a working class community who says to me constantly… ‘When are we going to see relief?’” Hyndman said. “If you’re telling me that it’s going to be higher for the consumer, that’s not a message I can pass on to the people who send me up here.”
Martinez said her bill offered the most cost-effective solution to the state’s waste problem.
“This isn’t a distraction,” she said. “It’s a serious solution that won’t pit economic growth against environmental sustainability.”
But the bill faces a steep climb in Albany, given that it’s been introduced in the legislature’s environmental committees, which are chaired by the sponsors of its older rival.
“I would be surprised if the committee chairs pushed out a bill that wasn’t their bill,” said Zuber, of the Business Council. “Whether or not it facilitates a discussion later about a bill that could work for everybody, I have absolutely no clue at this point in time.”