One of lead sponsors of the bill, state Sen. Peter Harckham, D-Peakskill, said on the Senate floor June 7 that it was a workable compromise.
"All we're asking corporations to do is to be better corporate neighbors and rethink the life cycle of their products," he said, pointing to overburdened landfills, the state's 12 waste incinerators, including in his district, and the pollution that comes from them.
"We're paying for it in taxes. We're paying for it in public health costs," he said. "This is not an unreasonable demand to ask of corporate America."
The bill that passed the Senate would have given companies 12 years to develop compliant packaging, and if they could not because of requirements from the Food and Drug Administration or other agencies, they could keep using existing materials, he said.
EPR is needed to make companies more financially responsible for packaging waste in the state and shift costs of recycling away from local governments, Harckham said.
He argued companies can innovate and design new packaging that's more recyclable or uses less material.
"We put a man on the moon in 10 years," he said. "We can come up with a new piece of candy wrapper in 12 years that has 30 percent less packaging or is made from a more sustainable material."
Senate opponents said the bill would have raised food prices in New York.
They pointed to memos widely circulating among lawmakers from Kraft Heinz and other companies that the EPR plan would limit their ability to use flexible packaging and did not have clear enough waivers for food safety.
Kraft Heinz, for example, wrote that a more attainable goal for industry would be EPR provisions like those in California or Minnesota that require 100 percent recyclable or compostable packaging by 2032.
Sen. Thomas O'Mara, R-Elmira, said he worried it would push manufacturing out of the state.
He pointed to a June decision by expanded polystyrene food service container maker Genpak LLC to close its packaging plant in Middletown, N.Y., because of the state's 2020 EPS ban.
"Genpak just announced last week that due to the restriction on the use of their product in New York, they're shutting down their plant," O'Mara said. "That's 138 jobs, good paying, AFL-CIO union jobs leaving the state."
But Harckham told his colleagues that packaging EPR has been used widely in Europe and Canadian provinces and hasn't resulted in disaster in grocery stores or in the food supply.
He predicted it's coming to the U.S., with new laws on the books in California and four other states.
"The notion that a multinational corporation that is already doing this in Europe … is going to walk away from the New York market and the California market, which are among the largest economies in the world, is pure bluster," Harckham said.