For three years running, a bill that would force corporations to cut single-use plastic packaging by 30 percent and hand New York taxpayers an estimated 1.3 billion dollars in waste-disposal savings has had the votes to pass the Assembly. For three years running, Speaker Carl Heastie has refused to put it on the floor. This year he said the quiet part out loud: he is personally a yes, and it died anyway, two days before the session ended, after a lobbying blitz run in part by his own ex-roommate, a former top aide, and a woman New York Focus reports he has been romantically involved with.

The bill is the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, carried in the Assembly by Deborah Glick and in the Senate by Pete Harckham as A1749 and S1464, according to NY State of Politics. It makes the companies that flood your apartment with clamshells, mailers, and pouches pay to deal with the waste instead of leaving the tab on your city tax bill, and it forces them to shrink that packaging 30 percent over 12 years. Beyond Plastics, the advocacy group founded by former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck, says the measure also bans 17 toxic chemicals plus PFAS and PVC from packaging and sets up a producer-paid fee system, which is why it has been called the most sweeping packaging law in the country.

The Senate already passed it. Twice. The upper chamber cleared it in 2024 and again on May 28, 2025, and the Assembly let the clock run out both times, per NY State of Politics. So the only thing standing between this bill and a vote, three years in a row, is the Assembly floor, which is Heastie’s to control.