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New York's plastic waste situation is bleak: overflowing landfills, pollutants pumping into the atmosphere, microplastics in our bodies—and, as a cherry on top, the fact that our tax dollars are funneled into dealing with all of this plastic garbage. Advocates for the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Act (PRRA) want to change that, by requiring that companies making more than $5 million a year in revenue enact a 30 percent reduction in single-use packaging over a 12-year period. The bill would also ban certain chemicals from being used in packaging, with a fee imposed on companies depending on which kind of packaging they continue to use, deferred to state agencies that deal with plastics recycling.
Conceptually, the policy is overwhelmingly popular with New Yorkers: a Siena Poll released in April found that 73 percent of New Yorkers would support a state-imposed reduction of single-use packaging for companies making just $1 million a year in annual revenue, an even lower bar than the PRRA proposes. The bill has passed in the state senate for the past two years in a row, but was derailed at the last minute in 2024, and failed to go up for a vote in the state assembly in 2025, once again faltering on the final day of the legislative session. What gives? According to a new report from Beyond Plastics, an environmental policy advocacy group, it's more like who gives: In 2025 alone, some of the biggest companies in the world spent an eye-bulging amount of resources lobbying against the PRRA, outnumbering the entities lobbying in the bill's favor by four to one.