Big Apple Trash to be Landfilled here due to Albany Inaction?
by John S. Szalasny
Town of Amherst Recycling and Waste Committee Chair
Editor’s note: This is a follow-up to Mr. Szalasny’s March, 2024 article.
Sometimes I wonder why our State Government set up regulatory agencies, tasking them with planning for the future of the state within their expertise, only to allow their plans to die due to inaction within the State Legislature. Worse still, bills are passed every year and new tasks added to agencies like the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) even though their budgets haven’t even kept with inflation compared to the lesser workloads they had in the 1980s.
Every state agency suffers from underfunding and understaffing. I single out the DEC, as one of their major calls for action has been ignored as “trash talk” by the Governor and the Legislature.
In 2023, the DEC released the latest NYS Solid Waste Management Plan (SLMP), outlining the need for major reforms in how New York handles the last stage of our consumer consumption. Subtitled “Building The Sustainable Economy Through Sustainable Materials Management,” the need for action couldn’t be greater.
New York City understands there is a solid waste crisis. They need to ship their garbage hundreds of miles away. This is one of the reasons they have been leading the nation in reducing their single use waste through their Expanded Polystyrene Food Packaging ban and the “Skip the Stuff” legislation to reduce the waste of the throwaways dumped in the bottom of your takeout bags. Additionally, New York City is the largest in the nation with a city-wide composting program, removing food scraps from the garbage stream.
Communities elsewhere in the state have the same issue but don’t have the same focus. Seen as a separate line on the taxes, local lawmakers ignore waste management until negotiations occur with the waste hauler and are surprised by a huge increase for their next contract.
The DEC, to its credit, has followed the lead of the Big Apple. They see trends of today showing that the average consumer in the US consumes and throws away twice as much as they did 50 years ago, combined with the scheduled closure of many major upstate landfills within this decade. One of these, the Seneca Meadows landfill, is a major destination for New York City garbage. This will have to go somewhere else, and the next likely stop would be the Republic Services Niagara Falls landfill.
The SLMP makes many recommendations, but some will require implementation by the Legislature. Key among these is the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA – A.1749/S.1464). The current system passes the costs of the handling of packaging waste to the taxpayer. The PRRIA would make the manufacturer responsible for the entire lifecycle of their products, including disposal or recycling. This bill had a majority of members in both chambers in 2024 as co-sponsors, but it never came up for a vote in the Assembly.
Critics state that this would raise consumer prices, but in the short term, the reality is that it is a transfer of consumer costs from tax bill to the shopping bill. Incentives are included in the bill for the producer to pay less if they have less waste, whether it be through redesign, reuse, or better recyclability of their packaging, therefore leading eventually to lower overall costs for New York consumers.
The SLMP also supports an expansion of our 40-year-old Bottle Bill that would expand the types of beverages accepted and raise the deposit to account for inflation. Many of these proposals were originally proposed in the 2019 Governor’s Budget, and this serves as an excellent complement to the PRRIA to reduce the explosion of material going to our landfills.
John S. Szalasny is the Chair of the Town of Amherst (NY) Recycling and Waste Committee
