The Recycling Partnership applauds today’s announcement by the Biden Administration to combat plastic pollution and utilize a whole-of-government approach that includes recycling, reuse, and source reduction. The strategy makes it clear that emerging and comprehensive national policy can change our linear economy.
“We know from over a decade of work in moving the recycling system forward that public policies like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Post-Consumer Recycled Content Mandates are necessary to galvanize and incentivize the scale of system change needed, as seen from the latest data in our State of Residential Recycling report,” said Kate Davenport, Chief Policy Officer of The Recycling Partnership.
The world is facing a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, all of which are affected by natural resource extraction and unnecessarily discarded paper and packaging. Smart, well-designed policies such as EPR can address the gaps in our nation’s residential recycling, working to ensure everyone can and does recycle and that old stuff gets turned into new stuff, thus reducing our need to extract more natural resources, strengthening domestic supply chains, and creating domestic jobs.
In the last three years, Maine, Colorado, Oregon, California, and Minnesota have all passed EPR legislation for packaging. According to The Recycling Partnership’s estimates, the five states that have adopted EPR are projected to recycle a combined additional 2 to 2.8 million tons of material annually that would otherwise be wasted.
Today, states are leading the way in understanding how to implement effective EPR, and these lessons can inform a national model that creates positive results for businesses, communities, and our environment. The Recycling Partnership advocates for comprehensive state and national EPR policies for all materials and stands ready to accelerate its adoption and implementation, working together with the diversity of constituents that intersect with these complex challenges.