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A Lucrative Border-Industrial Complex Keeps the US Border in Constant 'Crisis' |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55605"><span class="small">Todd Miller, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 19 April 2021 12:42 |
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Miller writes: "It's time to build bridges, not walls."
'Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign received three times more campaign contributions from the border industry than did Donald Trump's.' (photo: Wolfgang Schwan/REX/Shutterstock)
A Lucrative Border-Industrial Complex Keeps the US Border in Constant 'Crisis'
By Todd Miller, Guardian UK
19 April 21
In 1994, the US’s annual border and immigration budget was $1.5bn. In 2020, the budget exceeded $25bn - a 16-fold increase
 ’ll never forget Giovanni’s blistered feet as an EMT attended to him on the Mexico side of the US-Mexican border in Sasabe, a remote desert town. On the back of one foot, his skin had been rubbed away and the tender, reddish, underlying tissue exposed. One toenail had completely ripped off. Giovanni, who was from a small Guatemalan town near the Salvadorean border, had just spent days walking through the Arizona desert in the heat of July.
When I think of the “border crisis”, I think of Giovanni’s gashed feet. Stories of death and near death, of pain and immense suffering like this, happen every single day. This displacement crisis is not temporary; it is perpetual.
This is something that I’ve witnessed in my own reporting for more than two decades. The border by its very design creates crisis. This design has been developed and fortified over the span of many administrations from both political parties in the United States, and now involves the significant participation of private industry.
The border-industrial complex and its consequences is one of the reasons that I argue in my new book Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders that if people honestly want a humane response to border and immigration issues we have to confront something much bigger than the Trump legacy, and begin to imagine and work towards something new.
Across the line from where I sat looking at Giovanni’s feet was one of the most fortified and surveilled borders on planet Earth. An array of armed border patrol agents, walls, surveillance towers, implanted motion sensors and Predator B drones were deployed specifically to force people like Giovanni (and the group of five people he was with) into desolate, deadly regions. Like many, he walked a full day through a rugged mountain range until his feet became too wounded and his shins started to give out. He also ran out of water.
What happened to Giovanni is part of the design of what the US border patrol calls “prevention through deterrence”. By blockading traditional crossing areas in border cities, a 1994 border patrol strategic memo notes, the desert would put people in “mortal danger”.
At the beginning of this strategy, in 1994 under the Bill Clinton administration, the annual border and immigration budget was $1.5bn, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In 2020, the combined budget of its superseding agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), exceeded $25bn. That is a 16-fold increase.
Another way to look at the scope of this money juggernaut are the 105,000 contracts, totaling $55bn, that CBP and Ice have given private industry – including Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, G4S, Deloitte and Core Civic, among others – to develop the border and immigration enforcement apparatus. That is worth more than the total cumulative number of border and immigration budgets from 1975 to 2003. That’s 28 years combined amounting to $52bn. The companies can also give campaign contributions to key politicians and lobby during budget debates. And so we have the formula of a perpetual “border crisis”: the bigger the crisis, the more need for border infrastructure, generating more revenue.
One result? Since the 1990s, nearly 8,000 human remains have been found in the US borderlands. The number of actual deaths is almost certainly much higher. Families of migrants continued to search for lost loved ones.
In this sense, Giovanni was lucky. He decided he could go no further and left his group. He was disoriented when he turned around. The high desert landscape of mesquite and grasslands all blended together. Luckily, he found a puddle from a rain storm, which likely saved his life from death of dehydration.
By the time I saw him, Giovanni’s feet were a disaster, but that wasn’t the disaster that brought him to the border. As the EMT applied antibiotic cream so that his discolored feet glistened, he spoke to me at length about the fact that it hadn’t rained in his community for 40 days; the crops wilted, and the harvest never came. He lived in the “dry corridor”, he told me. The term describes a huge swath of territory running from Guatemala to Nicaragua that is getting dryer and dryer as a direct result of global warming. According to an estimate from the World Food Programme, this has left 1.4 million farmers in severe crisis.
In that sense, Giovanni was, like many others coming from Central America, driven by the climate crisis. The back-to-back hurricanes in late 2020, in particular, displaced countless people. Since the United States has produced nearly 700 times more carbon emissions than El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras combined since 1900, you might think it would be ethically obligated to help undo the damage. Instead, as with other large historic greenhouse gas emitters, it is at the global forefront of militarizing its borders.
As the Zapatistas say, Basta Ya. There has to be another way to imagine the world. Yet instead of truly confronting the problems that we face as a globe – such as climate change, endemic inequalities in which 2,000 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, and runaway pandemics where the health of people and peoples across borders become intimately interconnected - the solution somehow always becomes more border walls, more surveillance technologies and more suffering. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls worldwide. Now there are 70, two-thirds created since 9/11.
Clearly the time has arrived for new questions to be asked. When geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses the abolition of prisons, she talks about presence. “Abolition is about presence,” Gilmore has said, “not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” Gilmore stresses that abolition today is not just about ending incarceration, but also about “abolishing the conditions under which prisons became solutions to problems”. This approach also applies to borders: how do we shift the conditions under which borders and walls became acceptable solutions to problems? Perhaps the answer lies not in the impossible task of building a humane border, but rather a more humane world in which concepts such as borders and prisons are seen as outmoded, unjust ways of relating to one another.
Maybe the biggest impediment to this is the global border-industrial complex. Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign received three times more campaign contributions from the border industry than did Donald Trump’s. While the president has called for a reversal of Trumpian policies, he is far from challenging a border-industrial complex that leaves people like Giovanni with ravaged feet and near death in the Sonoran Desert. The border is designed to be in a perpetual crisis, but we can stop this by shifting to something new. Abolition is not about destruction, but about restoring who we can be. It’s time to build bridges, not walls.
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FOCUS: The Fight for Health Care for All Is Opening Up in the States |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=57403"><span class="small">Julia Rock, Jacobin</span></a>
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Monday, 19 April 2021 12:02 |
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Rock writes: "There's no substitute for a national Medicare for All program. But with federal action shelved for now, states like Colorado and Washington are grappling with creating public health insurance alternatives in the face of industry opposition."
A march to demand universal health care in Maryland in 2013. (United Workers/flickr)
The Fight for Health Care for All Is Opening Up in the States
By Julia Rock, Jacobin
19 April 21
There’s no substitute for a national Medicare for All program. But with federal action shelved for now, states like Colorado and Washington are grappling with creating public health insurance alternatives in the face of industry opposition.
 n the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised to create a nationwide public health insurance option that would lower patient costs, improve medical care, and help small businesses deal with soaring health care costs.
While a Medicare for All, single-payer health care system would be simpler, cheaper, and guarantee universal coverage, Biden and Democrats in competitive Senate races pitched a public option as a way to expand and improve coverage without fundamentally changing how most people get health insurance today. And the Congressional Budget Office recently reported that a robust public option could reduce premiums and save Americans big money.
So far, however, President Biden and Democrats in Congress have made little effort to follow through on the pledge, instead opting to funnel tens of billions of dollars to private health insurance companies to put people on expensive insurance exchange plans known for large out-of-pocket costs and high rates of denied claims.
Amid the leadership vacuum in Washington — and as premiums and insurance profits continue to skyrocket — state lawmakers have been frantically working to develop their own alternatives to try to help Americans combat increasingly costly medical coverage. Their efforts spotlight the challenges and opportunities for states trying to offer their citizens a public health insurance option.
While such state-level public option programs are no replacement for a national Medicare for All program, many see them as tangible and constructive health care reform for budget-strapped states barred from deficit spending.
Washington state led the way in 2019, establishing the nation’s first public insurance option. The program was supposed to provide a cheaper alternative that people would choose on the state’s insurance exchange. But so far, enrollment has only reached about 1 percent of the population, largely because the program does not require hospitals to accept the insurance and most have chosen not to.
As the state’s lawmakers prepare to pass a much-needed fix, the battle over a public option is heating up in Colorado for the second year in a row. This time, legislators are hopeful they can overcome a swarming lobbying effort and propaganda campaign to derail the bill.
Lawmakers in Connecticut and Oregon are also considering legislation to establish a public option.
A Faulty First Attempt in Washington State
In 2019, the Washington state legislature passed a bill creating a new state health insurance program, Cascade Care, with two elements: new standardized plans that private insurers were required to offer, as well as a public option.
Both the private, standardized plans and the public option are administered by private insurers and are required to offer a standard set of benefits such as primary care visits, generic drugs, and mental health care services.
The main difference between the standard option and the public option is that the public option plans reimburse providers at a rate of up to 160 percent of the Medicare reimbursement rate, which is lower than what private insurers typically pay. Employer-based plans, for example, pay an average reimbursement rate of 240 percent of Medicare.
The lower reimbursement rate is supposed to keep costs down. While premiums for the Cascade Care plans were higher than the average plan offered on the exchange, Cascade Care options had deductibles that were, on average, $1,000 lower than other plans.
But the bill had a significant loophole that made the plans inaccessible: Hospitals successfully lobbied to ensure they were not compelled to accept the insurance, due to the public option’s lower reimbursement rates than private insurance. Cascade Care’s public option plans, as a result, were only available to Washingtonians in half of the state’s counties.
“Hospitals were opposed to it, and they never moved off of their opposition,” said the bill’s lead sponsor, Democratic representative Eileen Cody.
When the public option launched during the 2021 enrollment period, about 15 percent of people buying health insurance on the state exchange opted for Cascade Care plans, but fewer than 5 percent of the people who bought those plans actually chose the state’s public option plans.
As a result, only 1,872 people are currently utilizing the state’s public option, or less than 1 percent of people who get health insurance through the state exchange. That percentage is slightly higher — about 2.5 percent — when taken just as a percentage of people who enrolled on new plans in 2021 as opposed to keeping their old plans.
In order to solve this problem, the state Senate passed a fix earlier this year, requiring hospital systems to accept the public option plans. The fix was then modified and passed by the state House. Now, the Senate needs to concur on the modified legislation.
“The trigger is that any hospital that contracts with Medicaid or the state employee health care plans would have to accept a public option plan,” said Cody, adding, “Everybody takes Medicaid.”
Cody expects the state Senate to concur on the legislation this week, and Governor Jay Inslee is expected to sign it into law. She has one piece of advice for lawmakers in Colorado working on public option legislation: “Prepare for a fight.”
A New Strategy in Colorado
Colorado has been a major health care battleground since 2016, when activists ran a single-payer ballot measure that prompted Democratic consultants to help the insurance industry crush it at the polls.
Following that defeat, state lawmakers went to work on public option legislation last year, with the support of Democratic governor Jared Polis. They passed a bill out of a House committee just two days before the legislature shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The private health insurance industry aggressively opposed the bill, arguing it was better to let the industry lower costs voluntarily rather than by government mandate, according to state representative Dylan Roberts, one of the leading public option advocates in Colorado.
“What we heard continuously during the bill debate was that insurance companies know health care costs are too high, and that they would like the opportunity to lower costs without strict government intervention, or any type of government intervention, actually,” Roberts said.
This year, Colorado Democrats are trying a new strategy by calling the private health care industry’s bluff. Their revised public option bill would give private insurers the opportunity to significantly reduce costs over two years before a public option is introduced.
The bill would require insurers offering plans on the state individual or small group marketplace to offer a new standardized insurance plan, which will be designed by the state health insurance commissioner.
If insurers manage to reduce premiums and deductibles on their standardized plans by 10 percent each year in 2023 and 2024, then the state won’t set up its public option plan.
“We built in the first phase of the bill to take the insurance companies at their word and allow them two and a half years to get costs down,” said Roberts. “If they do, great, we all benefit from lower health insurance costs.”
But if they fail to do so, then the state will apply for a waiver from the Biden administration, a so-called “Innovation Waiver” created under the Affordable Care Act, and it will use the money from the waiver to set up a public option. The public option, or “Colorado option,” would be the state’s version of a standardized plan.
About 15 percent of the state’s population is projected to be offered the public option plans. These are people who either don’t get health insurance through their employer and buy it on the state’s exchange, or people who work for small businesses that opt for their employees to be covered under the public option.
The Colorado legislation also integrates lessons learned from the effort in Washington state.
For example, the bill is designed to align cost-cutting measures with the introduction of standardized plans, said Adam Fox, deputy director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, a consumer advocacy group supporting the public option legislation.
“In the Colorado option legislation, we’re essentially requiring insurance carriers to offer the standardized plan. And those are the plans that they have to meet these target reductions on,” Fox told us.
In Washington, Fox said, the standardized plans were separate from the cost-cutting elements of the legislation. That resulted in higher premiums, even though Cascade Care plans did have lower deductibles than other private insurance plans.
The bill also creates a fee schedule for provider reimbursement rates, which are slightly higher for rural hospitals and lower for highly profitable hospitals that are part of larger networks. The reimbursement rates would be set through a public rulemaking process, Fox said.
Perhaps most important, the Colorado legislation is statewide, meaning providers can’t refuse the insurance as they have in Washington state. And, unlike the Washington plans, which are administered by private insurers, Colorado’s public option will be operated by a nonprofit entity set up by the state.
Roberts said that, while the bill would only make modest changes to the state’s health care system, especially during the first stage, it could have important reverberations across the country, showing people how government action can reduce health care costs and improve care.
“It’s not a total overhaul of our health care system in Colorado or in the United States by any means,” he said. “However, we would be the first state in the country that would do something like this, where it would be truly a statewide plan that’s available to every Coloradan that wants to purchase it. I would love to see it trickle out across the country, and hopefully show Congress in Washington that this is something that they should pursue on a national level.”
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RSN: How Much Did Amazon Spend to Crush the Union Drive in Alabama? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35143"><span class="small">Paul Gottinger, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 19 April 2021 10:54 |
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Gottinger writes: "Last week, Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, voted against forming a union after an almost two-month-long election that received significant national attention. The vote was 738 in favor of a union to 1,798 against it. But this isn't over yet."
Amazon recently faced an attempt by workers in unionize in Alabama. (image: Elif Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Dustin Chambers/ReutersSamantha Lee/Insider)
How Much Did Amazon Spend to Crush the Union Drive in Alabama?
By Paul Gottinger, Reader Supported News
19 April 21
 ast week, Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, voted against forming a union after an almost two-month-long election that received significant national attention. The vote was 738 in favor of a union to 1,798 against it.
But this isn’t over yet.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is challenging the election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over what the union describes as Amazon’s illegal interference in the election. The union alleges that Amazon put a ballot dropbox on warehouse property after the NLRB told Amazon that wasn’t allowed because it could be seen as an attempt to intimidate workers. The union will ask for a second election, claiming the last one was spoiled by Amazon’s illegal practices.
Last week, RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum said the union believes a second election at the Amazon facility in Bessemer is “very likely.”
Regardless of whether or not the NLRB allows a second election, this loss is painful to supporters of organized labor. Following the election, Amazon’s stock reached a 7-week high, while its workers continue to face what they describe as humiliating and unsafe working conditions without union representation for the foreseeable future.
A union victory at Amazon, a company that has managed to prevent unionization of its U.S. workers for decades, would have been an enormous accomplishment for organized labor.
But what caused the defeat?
In the week since the election, a number of postmortems have been written lamenting the election and dissecting the supposed tactical mistakes and weak messaging from union organizers.
Sure, no union drive is perfect, and of course mistakes are made. But a major factor in union elections, like elections for public office in the U.S., is money. And Amazon, run by the world’s richest man, has a lot of it to throw into its war on unions.
Amazon’s victory over its workers was made possible by what the workers describe as a ruthless campaign of surveillance, intimidation, illegal firings, threats of closing the facility, the movement of thousands of new workers to the facility before the election, and months of anti-union propaganda, which in total likely cost Amazon tens of millions of dollars.
Amazon faces dozens of federal allegations from its facilities across the country for firing workers who organized protests and walk-outs demanding the company improve its COVID-19 safety best practices. Amazon employees at multiple facilities report fear of being open about their support for a union at work because they might be fired or harassed.
Since February of 2020, there have been at least 37 charges filed with the NLRB against Amazon in twenty cities across the country.
One tactic Amazon used to its advantage against the union campaigners was engineering extremely high turnover in Amazon facilities (averaging about 100 new employees a week). This meant union organizers constantly had to convince new employees of the merits of the union, while losing union-supporting employees. Amazon also manipulated hiring numbers in the run-up to the union election, according to Joshua Brewer, the lead organizer:
Think about the challenges that that poses, when Amazon is able to manipulate the hiring numbers to such extremes that they can bring in 3,000 workers in a month but they can also fire 1,000 workers a month. In a Covid world you don’t have workers going to people’s houses, you don’t have committee people going to work parties with their friends after work. You don’t have workers hanging out in break rooms, places that you can normally have these larger discussions.
Should we really be surprised that Amazon was able to defeat the union drive if, as alleged, it surged employees to the facility, fired employees who engaged in union activities, and outspent the union organizers by as much as 25 times?
Adam Obernauer, an organizer with RWDSU, called Amazon’s union-busting campaign “the platinum package.” Amazon hired one of the country’s largest and most expensive union-avoidance law firms, Morgan Lewis, to handle its legal fight, according to Professor John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.
Amazon also hired two anti-union consulting firms, paying $10,000 per day (more than an Amazon warehouse employee makes in three months) on three anti-union consultants, including one who is the president of a Koch Brothers-funded, anti-union think tank, according to The Intercept.
These three consultants previously ran anti-union campaigns against organizing nurses in North Carolina, and a tire manufacturing plant in Georgia, where the NLRB found the consultants used “numerous and egregious” unfair labor practices.
As if that weren’t enough, Amazon also hired a second anti-union consulting firm, Labor Services Relations Inc., as first reported by Huffington Post. Amazon’s consulting contract with the firm lists “no maximum hours” and “no maximum fees” as conditions for its employment by Amazon.
According to the RWDSU, these “union avoidance” consultants ran months of captive audience “classes” in which employees were subjected to anti-union propaganda and to which attendance was mandatory. Employees who attended the sessions said pushback against the anti-union messaging during these events resulted in intimidating actions like being called in front of the class and having their employee badge photographed.
Amazon workers allege that the company used tried and true anti-unionization tactics like the captive audience classes mentioned above, unidentified individuals harassing workers on shift about their views on unionization, and threats of warehouse closure and firing.
But Amazon also used a tactic labor organizers said they have never seen before in a union election. In late February, Amazon began offering up to $3,000 in “resignation bonuses” to employees who quit, according to Payday Report.
Employees at the Alabama plant received emails stating that if they quit now, they could regain their jobs later after the union election, but they would be unable to vote in the union election.
To an unhappy Amazon employee who planned to vote for a union, an offer of a few thousand dollars might be enticing. However, under U.S. federal labor laws, the “bonuses” could be seen by the NLRB as bribes, which are illegal.
While bonuses for quitting may be unusual, other forms of bribery are a very common tactic used by employers during a union drive.
“The NLRB routinely finds violations for ‘conferring benefits’ to induce employees not to vote for a union during the ‘critical period’ between the time the election petition is filed and the election is held,” University of Wyoming labor law professor Mike Duff, a former prosecutor for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) told Payday News.
Amazon has refused to say how much they spent in total on crushing the union, but one attorney working with Amazon estimated it could be in the tens of millions of dollars. Joshua Brewer, the lead organizer for the union campaign, called Amazon’s effort “the most expensive, extensive, and sophisticated anti-union campaign ever run.”
Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted in March, “All I want to know is why the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, is spending millions trying to prevent workers from organizing a union so they can negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions.”
Some on the union side estimate Amazon spent as much as $25 million defeating the union drive.
Professor John Logan told labor reporter Steven Greenhouse back in February, “I don’t think there’s any amount of money Amazon won’t be prepared to spend to win. If the RWDSU lost, it would be a tremendous disappointment. If Amazon loses, it’s a disaster, it’s a catastrophe for them.”
One huge factor that makes it difficult to estimate what Amazon spent to defeat the union drive in Alabama is the company’s sophisticated technological surveillance and intelligence apparatus, which appears to be built into the backbone of the company, according to recent reports.
A leaked document dated February 2020 and first reported by Vice discussed in detail Amazon’s plans to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to “better analyze and visualize data on unions around the globe” using a new technology system called the geoSPatial Operating Console, or SPOC.
Among the topics discussed for analysis using the tool are: “Whole Foods Market Activism/Unionization Efforts,” “union grant money flow patterns,” “and “Presence of Local Union Chapters and Alt Labor Groups.”
As reported by Vice, additional leaked documents shed light on Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center:
Internal emails sent to Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division’s team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action), and a description of what happened, such as a “strike” or “the distribution of leaflets.” Other documents reveal that Amazon intelligence analysts keep close tabs on how many warehouse workers attend union meetings; specific worker dissatisfactions with warehouse conditions, such as excessive workloads; and cases of warehouse-worker theft.
Amazon is also able to lean on its military contracting experience to bring in former FBI members and former military intelligence to monitor union organizing “threats” to the company, according to reports in The Intercept.
In one particularly disturbing account, an Amazon employee named Jonathon Bailey, who organized a walkout over Covid-19 safety concerns, alleges he was “detained” on his lunch break by an individual wearing a black camouflage vest who identified himself as former FBI.
Amazon also monitors its employees’ and contractors’ social media, including their closed Facebook groups in 43 U.S. cities, according to Vice.
Amazon uses something called the “Advocacy Operations Social Listening Team” as well as employees using anonymous accounts to allegedly conduct surveillance on Amazon employees.
If Amazon uses all these immensely sophisticated programs to monitor employees as alleged, it impossible to guess the total amount Amazon spent on defeating the union drive in Bessemer.
Corporations spend $340 million per year on “union avoidance” consultants every year in an attempt to deny workers their right to organize.
Until the laws in the U.S. change to force corporations to be more transparent about their anti-union funding and tactics, and put strict limits on what they can do, organized labor will continue to face a tough road ahead.
Paul Gottinger is a staff reporter at RSN whose work focuses on the Middle East and the arms industry. He can be reached on Twitter @paulgottinger or via
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Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Spare Yourself the Guilt Trip This Earth Day - It's Companies That Need to Clean Up Their Acts |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59129"><span class="small">Courtney Lindwall, The Natural Resources Defense Council</span></a>
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Monday, 19 April 2021 08:16 |
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Lindwall writes: "Coined in the 1970s, the classic Earth Day mantra 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' has encouraged consumers to take stock of the materials they buy, use, and often quickly pitch - all in the name of curbing pollution and saving the earth's resources."
Plastic bails, left, and aluminum bails, right, are photographed at the Green Waste material recovery facility on Thursday, March 28, 2019, in San Jose, California. (photo: Aric Crabb/Digital First Media/Bay Area News/Getty Images)
Spare Yourself the Guilt Trip This Earth Day - It's Companies That Need to Clean Up Their Acts
By Courtney Lindwall, The Natural Resources Defense Council
19 April 21
 oined in the 1970s, the classic Earth Day mantra "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" has encouraged consumers to take stock of the materials they buy, use, and often quickly pitch — all in the name of curbing pollution and saving the earth's resources. Most of us listened, or lord knows we tried. We've carried totes and refused straws and dutifully rinsed yogurt cartons before placing them in the appropriately marked bins. And yet, nearly half a century later, the United States still produces more than 35 million tons of plastic annually, and sends more and more of it into our oceans, lakes, soils, and bodies.
Clearly, something isn't working, but as a consumer, I'm sick of the weight of those millions of tons of trash falling squarely on consumers' shoulders. While I'll continue to do my part, it's high time that the companies profiting from all this waste also step up and help us deal with their ever-growing footprint on our planet.
An investigation last year by NPR and PBS confirmed that polluting industries have long relied on recycling as a greenwashing scapegoat. If the public came to view recycling as a panacea for sky-high plastic consumption, manufacturers—as well as the oil and gas companies that sell the raw materials that make up plastics—bet they could continue deluging the market with their products.
There are currently no laws that require manufacturers to help pay for expensive recycling programs or make the process easier, but a promising trend is emerging. Earlier this year, New York legislators Todd Kaminsky and Steven Englebright proposed a bill—the "Extended Producer Responsibility Act"—that would make manufacturers in the state responsible for the disposal of their products.
Other laws exist in some states for hazardous wastes, such as electronics, car batteries, paint, and pesticide containers. Paint manufacturers in nearly a dozen states, for example, must manage easy-access recycling drop-off sites for leftover paint. Those laws have so far kept more than 16 million gallons of paint from contaminating the environment. But for the first time, manufacturers could soon be on the hook for much broader categories of trash—including everyday paper, metal, glass, and plastic packaging—by paying fees to the municipalities that run waste management systems. In addition to New York, the states of California, Washington, and Colorado also currently have such bills in the works.
"The New York bill would be a foundation on which a modern, more sustainable waste management system could be built," says NRDC waste expert Eric Goldstein.
In New York City alone, the proposed legislation would cover an estimated 50 percent of the municipal waste stream. Importantly, it would funnel millions of dollars into the state's beleaguered recycling programs. This would free up funds to hire more workers and modernize sorting equipment while also allowing cities to re-allocate their previous recycling budgets toward other important services, such as education, public parks, and mass transit.
The bills aren't about playing the blame game—they are necessary. Unsurprisingly, Americans still produce far more trash than anyone else in the world, clocking in at an average of nearly 5 pounds per person, every day—clogging landfills and waterways, harming wildlife, contributing to the climate crisis, and blighting communities. As of now, a mere 8 percent of the plastic we buy gets recycled, and at least six times more of our plastic waste ends up in an incinerator than gets reused.
It's easy to see why. Current recycling rules vary widely depending on where you live—and they're notoriously confusing. Contrary to what many of us have been told, proper recycling requires more than simply looking for that green-arrowed triangle, a label that may tell you what a product is made out of and that it is recyclable in theory, but not whether that material can be recycled in your town—or anywhere at all. About 90 percent of all plastic can't be recycled, often because it's either logistically difficult to sort or there's no market for it to be sold.
That recycling marketplace is also ever changing. When China, which was importing about a third of our country's recyclable plastic, started refusing our (usually contaminated) waste streams in 2018, demand for recyclables tanked. This led to cities as big as Philadelphia and towns as small as Hancock, Maine, to send even their well-sorted recyclables to landfills. Municipalities now had to either foot big bills to pick up recyclables they once sold for a profit or shutter recycling services altogether.
According to Goldstein, New York's bill has a good shot of passing this spring—and it already has the support of some companies that see the writing on the wall, or as the New York Times puts it, "the glimmer of a cultural reset, a shift in how Americans view corporate and individual responsibility." If the bill does go through, New Yorkers could start to see changes to both local recycling programs and product packaging within a few years.
What makes these bills so groundbreaking isn't that they force manufacturers to pay for the messes they make, but that they could incentivize companies to make smarter, less wasteful choices in the first place.
New York's bill, for instance, could help reward more sustainable product design. A company might pay less of a fee if it reduces the total amount of waste of a product, sources a higher percentage of recycled material, or makes the end product more easily recyclable by, say, using only one type of plastic instead of three.
"Producers are in the best position to be responsible because they control the types and amounts of packaging, plastics, and paper products that are put into the marketplace," Goldstein says.
Bills like these embody the principles of a circular economy—that elusive North Star toward which all waste management policies should point. By encouraging companies to use more recycled materials, demand for recyclables goes up and the recycling industry itself is revitalized. What gets produced gets put back into the stream for reuse.
If widely adopted, we could significantly reduce our overall consumption and burden on the planet. With less paper used, more forests would stay intact—to continue to store carbon, filter air and water, and provide habitat for wildlife and sustenance for communities. With less plastic produced, less trash would clog oceans and contaminate ecosystems and food supplies. In turn, we'd give fossil fuels even more reasons to stay in the ground, where they belong.
That would be my Earth Day dream come true—with little hand-wringing of fellow guilt-stricken individuals required.
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he extremity of Covid-19 vaccine 
