Environmental Bills Released in Committee Today

The following bills have been released by the Senate Environment and Energy Committee today, November 18^th:

S3939 (Smith/Greenstein): Establishes Recycling Market Development Council. The Council would look at existing recycling markets and recommend ways to stimulate recycling and how to reduce contamination of collected recyclables.

“We’re seeing a major drop in recycling in New Jersey. In the early 1990’s, we recycled over half of municipal and household waste. Now we are down to 37%. China’s decision to no longer import plastic waste has caused the recycling market to collapse. Some towns are no longer taking plastics. Recycling facilities are closing, or opening only once or twice a month. This bill says that New Jersey needs to develop new recycling markets. Rutgers has invented the first plastic lumber that uses recycled plastics, and more innovation needs to be encouraged. We need to focus on coming up with more markets for recycling, and establishing a Recycling Market Development Council is a step in the right direction,” said Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

S3944 (Bateman/Codey): Establishes task force to study recycling streams in NJ and challenges faced by local governments in running recycling programs.

“Given the serious problems with recycling in New Jersey, we need to change everything we do when it comes to solid waste. We need to first reduce, reuse, repurpose and then recycle. Our recycling and solid waste programs are decades out of date. Some towns are moving to single-stream recycling, which means more waste gets collected but results in a dirtier product. Establishing a recycling task force will help streamline New Jersey’s recycling. We also need legislation to reduce plastic wastes and solids. The less we recycle, the more greenhouse gases and pollution we have from emissions from landfills and new product manufacturing,” said Jeff Tittel.

S3919 (Smith/Bateman): Prohibits sale, lease, rent or installation of certain equipment or products containing hydrofluorocarbons or other greenhouse gases.

“This bill is a step in the right direction when it comes to reducing GHG’s from the products we use everyday. Hydrofluorocarbons represent around 1% of total greenhouse gases but their impact on global warming can be hundreds to thousands of times greater than that of carbon dioxide. They can be found in cooling products like refrigerators, air conditioning for our homes and cars, aerosols, and more,” said Tittel. “It is important that we prohibit and phase out all products containing HCF’s and greenhouse gases so that we can mitigate our impact on global warming.”

S4201 (Codey) amends list of environmental infrastructure projects approved for long-term funding for FY2020 to include new projects, remove certain projects, and modify estimated loan amounts for certain projects. S4202 (Bateman) authorizes NJ Infrastructure Bank to expend additional sums to make loans for environmental infrastructure projects for FY2020.

“We need to step it up when it comes to funding critical environmental programs for New Jersey.  We have major problems with lead including $8.2 billion worth of pipes that need to be fixed, $4.6 billion for getting lead out of our water and a $6 billion combined sewer overflow fix. Overall, we need at least $46 billion to fix New Jersey’s environmental problems. We also need to tie fixing our infrastructure to energy efficiency and renewable energy as well as green building including blue and green roofs to reduce flooding. If we don’t consider climate change, we could end up wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money,” said Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

S4203 (Greenstein): Makes changes to New Jersey Infrastructure Bank’s enabling act.

“This bill changes language that will allow for planning and engineering grants. These language changes will allow cities and towns to receive loans for planning and engineering work. This will allow them to plan for and complete important environmental infrastructure projects, including critical water supply and wastewater treatment projects,” said Jeff Tittel.