West Hempstead Activist Wages Anti-plastic Fight
By Kyle Chin | June 16, 2022 | L.I. Herald
West Hempstead’s Joseph Varon is continuing his crusade against the use of plastics, throwing his support behind two bills before the State Legislature. A seasoned veteran of environmental activism and recycling campaigning, Varon said he hopes to hold plastic producers more accountable.
One proposal would expand New York’s Bottle Bill, raising the deposit from five to 10 cents for each recycled bottle. The other bill, proposed by Assemblyman Steve Englebright, would introduce extended producer responsibility, placing fines and restrictions on companies generating plastic and encouraging a transition to more recyclable options.
New York’s Bottle Bill celebrated its 40th anniversary in May, and Varon spoke about its diminishing effectiveness over the years. “Most people won’t bother with a five-cent deposit anymore, especially with the limited number of deposit spots we have,” he said. “If you go to deposit your bottles and all the machines are being used by people with bags of hundreds of bottles, are you really going to wait for just five cents back?”
“The deposit has been five cents for 40 years,” he added. “Forty years ago you could get a soda for a quarter, now it’s at least $1.25. Frankly, even 10 cents is not enough.”
Varon further explained the plastic crisis. “A lot of plastic packaging today is photodegradable, meaning the sun will break it down into tiny pieces, but those pieces will never go away,” he said. “They stick around for hundreds of years. Fish and other animals ingest it, and it ends up in our food.”
Concerns surrounding so-called “microplastics” have grown in recent years, environmentalists have said. Studies have discovered microplastics nearly everywhere on earth, carried by wind and water. Researchers in Amsterdam also found trace plastics in the majority of blood samples they studied. What impact these materials might have on the body has yet to be studied in depth, they said.
Varon said that many old recycling campaigns, while successful, have been left somewhat obsolete by the mass proliferation of plastic packaging over the last few decades.
