Letters to the Editor

Is NY Becoming the Great Garbage Patch State?

In his recent Village View article, The New Emerald City (published September 2025) Siggy Raible writes, “another bugaboo about fossil fuels, plastics are derived from oil.” New York has a plastic pollution crisis. As the fourth largest state in the country, our state can make an enormous impact by curbing plastic production and use. An average of 6.8 million tons of packaging waste is produced each year in New York, constituting 40% of the total waste stream. Most of this packaging is sent to landfills, burned in incinerators (NY state holds the distinct honor of having more incinerators than any other state), or winds up polluting our streets and parks and beaches, with much of it getting into rivers and then into oceans.

For those unfamiliar, The Great Garbage Patch is a mass of plastic pollution twice the size of Texas that sits in the Pacific Ocean. It’s the result of the unsustainable overproduction and over consumption of plastic that has occurred in the past 25 years. There are 1.71 TRILLION pieces of plastic in our oceans, that is 500 times the amount of stars in the galaxy. One reason is that almost 50% of plastic is from disposable packaging, of which less than 6% is recycled in the U.S. With an average shelf life of minutes, it has led us to a life of convenience, with grim consequences. The movie, Plastic People, highlights the grim reality of the health implications and the shocking fact that 1.5 billion plastic bottles of water are sold every day, that’s more than one million bottles a minute.

We need a transformational change in both policy and consumer behavior. As stated in Judith Enck’s excellent new book, The Problem with Plastic, “it’s time to take real action, and limit plastic production, detoxify plastic products, and hold polluters financially responsible for cleaning up the mess.” There is good news, our state Assembly members have a strong and powerful solution of EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) legislation, The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA) (A1749/S1464) ready to pass in NY state. The bill, introduced by Senator Harckham and Assemblymember Glick, would also limit plastics’ harmful health impacts by banning the use of 17 highly toxic chemicals, including PFAS, bisphenols, formaldehyde, mercury, lead, and cadmium in packaging. It would also save New Yorkers $1.3 billion in 10 years by shifting the cost of dealing with this wasteful, polluting single-use plastic packaging from us taxpayers to the companies responsible for creating it.

There’s no more time left for reducing this waste that harms our health, pollutes our environment, and speeds climate change – the Legislature must pass this critical bill to put New York’s people and our planet over plastic now. I applaud Assemblymember and party-elect City Council Member, Harvey Epstein, for supporting PRRIA (and his excellent City & State opinion piece, New York Is Ready for single-use plastic waste reduction). In fact, based on a recent Siena poll, over 70% of New Yorkers also support PRRIA, and think plastic pollution is a problem. Let’s not let NY become the Great Garbage Patch state, I urge Assemblymember Carl Heastie to bring this bill to a vote ASAP when the Assembly convenes in January.

—Kristin Shevis, Beyond Plastics Speakers Bureau, NYC resident and NY state constituent