The lobbyists won in New York State this week. They successfully prevented a vote on the Plastic Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA), which by every account would have passed both chambers if Assembly Speaker Heastie had allowed lawmakers to bring it to the floor.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.*
(If I ever get a tattoo, it will be that.)
This bill has been pending in Albany for three years now, and I honestly think it is one of the most powerful pieces of anti-plastics legislation under consideration, globally. If passed, it would have capped the production single-use packaging by 30% incrementally over 12 years, prevented “chemical recycling” (an incineration technology that melts and burns plastic into a dirty fuel) from being classed as actual recycling, and banned the use of numerous toxicants from packaging, including all PFAS chemicals, phthalates, bisphenols, lead, mercury, and formaldehyde.
But those measures, though superb, are not really what made the bill so powerful. The true clout of PRRIA came from its positioning in New York, a state of 20 million people with a market too big for manufacturers to abandon. Adhering to the law would have forced adjustments in plastic production across a much wider region. It would have removed toxicants from food packaging for tens of millions of people, protecting the health of people far beyond the Empire State. Perhaps most importantly, it would have provided model legislation for states all over the country.
I’m showing my pride as a New Yorker here, but let’s be real: New York is a tough nut to crack This place throws down a gauntlet of opposition that tends to work out most forseeable kinks. The cacophany of interest groups in this state is so brassy that by the time a bill can make it through in Albany, it can get passed almost anywhere. Thus, much like California, New York is in the habit of passing progressive legislation that is later picked up in other states.
Which is precisely why the opposition could never let it pass. For the fourth year in a row, PRRIA had majority support in both chambers. Voters have always loved this bill. A 2024 Siena poll showed two thirds (67%) bipartisan support, with African Americans 81% in favor, and New Yorkers have been just as active and expressive about their enthusiasm this year.
Enter the torrent of lobbyists. Last year opponents of the PRRIA spent approximately $9.8 million on lobbying and related advocacy efforts (compared with about $1.5 million spent by supporters), and sent 106 lobbyists to argue against the bill. It was the first and second most lobbied bill during the final two months of the state legislative session. This year, there were even more.
The fact that industry influence was successful in preventing a vote on a bill in a blue state with a democratic governor and democratic control of both chambers — a bill that in any case had overwhelming, bipartisan voter support — is a bitter pill. It’s enough to make some of us want to throw up our hands and stomp out of the state house, determined to change tactics and take our bats and gloves someplace else for awhile. Which, in the short term, may not be such a poor use of time, and may even be good for morale.
Why? Because we’re already using other tactics, and it is already working.
We stuck an announcement into last week’s newsletter about the Massachusetts Medical Society’s (MMS) successful passage of an anti-plastics resolution. It seemed like a piece of “cool news” at the time, but on reflection, I think we buried the lede. It’s the stuff of headlines.
The resolution calls for the MMS to engage in all of the measures that medical societies can most effectively undertake, each and every one of which will go far to curtail the health harms of plastics. It calls for support for state-based legislation banning unnecessary (frivolous) plastics, for mandatory health testing of new chemicals developed for use in plastics production, for extended producer responsibility, for the reduction of unnecessary single use plastics from healthcare settings, and for the sharing of resources to ensure that all medical providers are informed of the long-term toxicities of plastic.
Medical Society resolutions are a powerful tool, because they transform individual concern into institutional medical consensus. They give physicians and scientists a mechanism to convert emerging evidence into an official position of a trusted professional organization. As such, they influence legislation and regulation and provide political cover. Support from physicians can reduce political risk when lawmakers seek to act on controversial issues — or ones heavily lobbied by industry. They also shape media narratives, providing trusted expert sources for journalists, along with a signal that an issue has become important enough for organized medicine to take a position.
And they tend to be contagious. Just like legislation in New York or California, a resolution adopted in one state medical society can be copied by another. In this way, change can spiral up, moving from state societies to other professional groups with significant clout, such as the American College of Gynecologists (ACOG) or the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP). It is not necessarily a linear process (the AMA itself has a resolution addressing microplastics; did you know?), but it is a powerful one. Everywhere it happens, it inspires similar measures elsewhere. And it creates durable institutional commitments all the while.
I am rarely inclined to sit at home and stick to my knitting, but sometimes there really can be better and more efficient uses for our time — in a good way. This may be one of them. The deck is stacked in Albany and several other states, and anyway the legislative sessions are winding down for the year. But P-SNAP has members in medical societies across the country, some of them quite powerful. We have the capacity to bring forward resolutions that can change the medical conversation, highlighting their hazardous nature of plastics and calling for safer formularies and more limited use. Let’s do that. The gridlock is legislative, not scientific or clinical. Let’s lean in.
*Intentional malapropism of the Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” from The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.