by Suna Bayrakal, PhD
Director, Policy and Programs
After Governor Hochul signed the legislation last week, New York became the second state after California to enact a carpet EPR law – and the first in the nation to include artificial turf. PSI was cited by NRDC and others as playing a significant role in advancing the legislation. “The enactment of New York’s carpet EPR bill benefited from two decades of advocacy from experts across the country, including those from state and local governments, environmental groups, and carpet recyclers,” said Scott Cassel, PSI’s CEO and founder. “This next-generation carpet EPR law is yet another indication that the overwhelming public sentiment is for producers to take responsibility to prevent negative impacts from their products and packaging all through their lifecycle.”
Spearheaded by Senator Brian Kavanagh and outgoing Assemblymember Steve Englebright, the bill passed both the Senate and Assembly in May and was expected to be signed quickly by Governor Kathy Hochul. Enactment was delayed in part by controversy over a proposed insertion of language that would have expanded the definition of “recycling” to include “chemical recycling” technologies such as pyrolysis, which many organizations, including PSI, consider energy recovery as it. The additional language was not included in the law.
Although the national average for carpet recycling is 5%, the rate in New York is just 1% — each year, the state sends 515 million pounds of unused or discarded carpet to fill up New York landfills or be burned in waste-to-energy plants. Local governments and businesses spend more than $22 million annually to dispose of it.
The New York carpet EPR law is a significant upgrade to the nation’s first carpet EPR law, enacted in 2010 in California, which was heavily promoted by the carpet industry. The New York law establishes mandatory goals for recycling and post-consumer content in new carpet, convenient collection statewide, education and awareness, and the phase out of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from new carpet production. It will also establish a multi-stakeholder advisory board to advise producers and the state, which oversees the program. Requiring carpet producers to finance and manage the collection and recycling of scrap carpet removes the financial burden of managing this bulky material from local governments and taxpayers and will reduce the energy needed to make new carpet, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and saving valuable natural resources.
The bill will also help create permanent full-time recycling jobs. Since the enactment of California’s law and two subsequent amendments, the state has created 500 direct and indirect jobs and, in 2021, achieved an annual carpet recycling rate of 27%. Projections show that New York could achieve those same goals in fewer than five years, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 165,000 tons per year, which is equivalent to taking 32,000 cars off the road.
by Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff, Marketing and Communications Director
In December, we celebrated our 22nd anniversary by representing the United States at conferences and events that furthered the international conversation about EPR. When this organization was founded by Scott Cassel in 2000, producer responsibility was in place in Europe and Canada, but had barely made a mark in the United States. Now, U.S. EPR is snowballing: In 2022 alone, legislators in 18 states considered 62 unique EPR bills covering 15 different product categories – and five became law. We welcomed the opportunities to celebrate with our national and international colleagues at these recent events:
In October, we joined a virtual NGO stakeholder meeting on plastics hosted by Monica Medina, the Assistant Secretary at the Department of State’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. Medina had called the meeting in preparation for the first session of the intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC-1) on plastic pollution, which was to take place a month later in Punta del Este, Uruguay. The meeting kicked off with Medina announcing the “north star goal” of zero plastic pollution by 2040, and confirming that “EPR will one hundred percent be part of the solution.”
The following month, we joined a panel that explored how Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and other key regulations impact recycling in North America at the Plastics Recycling World Expo in Cleveland and presented to legislators from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at a Chesapeake Bay Commission meeting on how to address plastic pollution through EPR legislation.
Then in December, PSI presented on EPR at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Recycling Committee meeting in Washington, D.C. and the National Conference of State Legislatures Private-Public Partnership on Recycling as part of a roundtable discussion on “Unpacking the Elements of Extended Producer Responsibility Legislation.”
Later that month, our CEO and founder Scott Cassel traveled to Paris to present on U.S. pharmaceuticals and medical sharps EPR as part of the 10 year anniversary celebration for DASTRI, the PRO responsible for sharps EPR management in France. Amanda Nicholson, our COO, discussed EPR and product stewardship as the concepts relate to manufacturing at a webinar hosted by ASSEMBLY magazine.
All in all, it was a busy and impactful quarter and a wonderful way to celebrate our 22nd year. We look forward to good things to come in 2023!
By Scott Cassel, Chief Executive Officer & Founder, Product Stewardship Institute
Several weeks ago, I ventured out to Indianapolis for the Indiana Recycling Coalition Conference to give a presentation on product stewardship and extended producer responsibility. I then headed over to another area of the conference center to participate in a panel as part of Indiana’s first E-cycle stakeholder meeting. In a room filled with dedicated solid waste managers, recyclers, environmentalists, and government officials, we took a look at Indiana’s current e-scrap recycling law to identify successes, challenges, and potential solutions.
Scott Cassel, Thom Davis, Katie Riley, and two representatives from Solid Waste Management Districts discuss the Indiana e-scrap recycling law. Photo courtesy of Denise Szocka.
Indiana’s electronics recycling law is an EPR law based on a “performance goal” system, meaning that manufacturers must collect a specific tonnage of e-scrap per year (i.e., their goal). In Indiana, manufacturers are responsible for collecting and recycling 60% of the total weight of video display devices that they sell. However, since the formula is based on sales of newer, light-weight electronics, and old bulky TVs are the heaviest and most common item collected, manufacturers reach their performance goals very quickly.
This has become a problem. When manufacturers have collected enough to meet their goal, they cut off payment to recyclers. Recyclers then stop accepting material from collection sites, or charge these sites a fee to take the material.
Four workshop attendees work together to identify problems and solutions.
Photo courtesy of Denise Szocka.
Once the basic problems were understood by the participants at the Indiana e-scrap workshop, they explored possible solutions. The conversation in that room was eerily similar to the stakeholder meetings held in New York and Illinois. Now that we have worked so hard at educating residents about the need to recycle electronics, we certainly don’t want to tell them that we can’t take what they bring us.
In the Indiana workshop, one of the potential solutions – raising performance goals – was suggested. In fact, both Illinois and Minnesota have passed updates to their laws just this year (which go into effect July 1, 2015), setting the performance goal at a specific fixed tonnage rather than at a percentage of yearly sales.
For a long-term, stable solution, however, changes should be made to the program structure. E-scrap programs with the highest collection rates – such as programs in Vermont, Oregon, Washington, and Maine – require manufacturers to meet convenience-based standards to ensure that a majority of residents have easy access to a collection site.
The panel and workgroup discussions at the Indiana e-scrap workshop were a great start to improving Indiana’s e-scrap law. These fixes won’t be easy to apply, and each state is having their own state-based discussions. At the same time, the Product Stewardship Institute is holding our own conversations with e-scrap program managers around the country to better understand the common issues they face so that we can help to instill greater stability in existing programs, and offer states with no e-scrap laws a roadmap for the future. Working together, we can come up with viable solutions that we hope will be implemented in years to come.
To read more about the different types of e-scrap programs and their results, check out the recent article in E-Scrap News, “Struggling State-by-State,” by PSI’s Resa Dimino.