When I saw the headline “Industry fights new recycling regimes” in the Aug. 1 Central Maine Sunday, it reminded me of how industry fought against the bottle bill years ago, threatening dire consequences if it passed. But now it’s just part of our routine; stores and households have adapted, redemption centers have sprung up, and bottle drives have joined bake sales and car washes as fund-raisers.

Since then, as disposal costs keep rising, municipalities have been trying to recycle more of the waste stream, but that cost is rising too. The packaging industry keeps creating more ways to display products on store shelves — like putting 30 pills in a bottle big enough to hold 90, and then putting that bottle in a cardboard box — with no thought to where all that packaging ends up.

The plastics industry stamps numbers in triangles on their packaging to give us the comforting illusion that it all gets recycled, but an awful lot of it doesn’t. Either it gets put in the trash, or dumped in the street (I always find plastic cups, lids, straws, and candy wrappers when I go out for a walk), or it gets to the recycling center, but there’s no market for the material, so it would cost too much to recycle it.

Either way, we end up paying the cost of disposal or recycling, in our taxes. Industry has no incentive to use recycled materials, or to use less packaging, because we pay for it.

In parts of Europe and Canada, “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) is already a reality; many U.S. states are also considering it. It’s time we made those who produce our trash share the responsibility for it.

 

Claire Prontnicki

Waterville

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