New York’s state legislature is expected to adjourn Friday without voting on a range of waste and recycling-related bills.
The legislature was meant to adjourn Thursday, but returned for a final day on Friday. Bills that aimed to establish EPR for packaging, upgrade the state’s bottle bill and ease trash collection from street sweeping weren’t expected to be a high priority compared with other last-minute votes.
New York lawmakers were also getting back on track in the days since they passed the state budget, a process that was five months in the making and passed two months late, Spectrum News reported.
EPR for packaging, bottle bills will not move forward
The New York state legislature is not expected to pass a contentious extended producer responsibility for packaging bill in the final hours of the session. The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act faced another year of intense scrutiny, lobbying and more than 30 amendments.
Previous versions of the bill passed the Senate in both 2024 and 2025, but neither made it through the Assembly before the clock ran out on the session.
This year, SB 1464A / A1749, sponsored by state Sen. Pete Harckham and Assemblymember Deborah Glick, called for certain packaging producers to join and pay into the EPR program. The bill also set reuse and recycling rates for packaging: 35% by 2032, which would ramp up to 75% by 2052, according to the bill. It also called for eliminating packaging that contained PFAS four years after the EPR program rules took effect.
Producers with more than $5 million in annual net revenue and packaging waste exceeding two tons annually would have also needed to meet certain packaging reduction requirements.
Supporters, including Beyond Plastics and a coalition of 19 environmental justice groups, advocated for the bill’s efforts to protect communities from pollution. But opponents, which included a range of businesses, including some recyclers and many packaging groups, said it would raise already-high grocery prices.
Kirstie Pecci, Executive Director at Just Zero, a bill supporter, called the outcome “deeply frustrating” but noted that partnerships between supporters could help move it forward in the future. “The strong coalition behind this bill has fundamentally changed the conversation around plastic pollution in New York,” she said in a statement.
Glick, who had championed the bill for the last few years, is retiring. In past years, she also headed up efforts to update the state’s beverage container deposit system under the “Bigger Better Bottle Bill” plan alongside Sen. Rachel May.
That bill did not move forward in 2026. It called for increasing deposits from 5 cents to 10 cents and expanding the program to include more kinds of containers, among other updates.
A separate deposit return bill, introduced late in the session this year by Sen. Patricia Fahy, would have added wine and liquor containers to the state program.
DSNY street sweeping bill passes assembly
A bill that would allow New York City’s Department of Sanitation to enforce street parking rules by using cameras mounted on street sweepers has passed the state Senate. S1891A is still awaiting consideration in the Assembly as of Friday.
Parking violations captured on street sweeper cameras would likely lead to more citations, which DSNY said will hopefully incentivize drivers to move their cars on street sweeping days. Street sweepers would only be allowed to use images captured on cameras for citation purposes and would be deleted after the process is complete, according to the bill. Images captured by street cleaning vehicle photo devices would not be allowed to capture the identity of the driver, passengers, or the contents of the vehicle.
DSNY Commissioner Gregory Anderson says New York City street sweepers can pick up 1,500 pounds of trash in a single shift, but “nearly 500,000 car owners disregard street cleaning regulations every week, keeping us from cleaning more than 3,000 miles of streets," Anderson said in a video calling for the bill’s passage.
The New York City Council supported the bill.
