MORNING SENTINEL • August 14, 2021
When I saw the headline “Industry fights new recycling regimes” 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. 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 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. We end up paying the cost of disposal or recycling in our taxes. In parts of Europe and Canada, “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) is already a reality. It’s time we made those who produce our trash share the responsibility for it. ~ Claire Prontnicki, Waterville