Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
The Honorable Christine Barber, House Chair
The Honorable Rebecca Rausch, Senate Chair
Joint Committee on Environment and Natural Resources
State House, Boston
Delivered electronically
Dear Chair Barber, Chair Rausch, and Distinguished Members of the Committee,
On behalf of the 351 cities and towns of the Commonwealth, the Massachusetts Municipal Association is writing to express our support for several bills before you that would encourage the recycling of difficult to manage products and prevent unnecessary plastic pollution.
At this critical moment, state and local leadership is needed to protect our environment. Municipal governments remain committed partners in this work, and look to you for leadership and recognition of the challenges they are facing to provide essential services to residents, businesses and visitors.
We respectfully request your consideration on a slate of priority bills related to recycling and plastics pollution reduction. Favorable reports on the bills detailed below would assist cities and towns with their continued and growing responsibilities as environmental stewards, ensure that communities are clean and safe, and result in significant cost savings for your constituents and residents across Massachusetts.
Extended Producer Responsibility
The MMA continues to support product stewardship legislation, as these mechanisms strengthen incentives for producers to incorporate environmental considerations into packaging and product designs. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a form of product stewardship, which would be required for certain products or materials. EPR would extend a manufacturer or producer’s responsibility to post-consumer management of that product and its packaging.
Over the past few years alone, cities and towns in the Commonwealth have seen dramatic cost increases in solid waste and recycling contracts. From 2021 to 2024, municipal solid waste disposal and recycling processing costs went up by 18% on average, according to recent data from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. When looking at difficult to manage products collected through hazardous household waste systems over that same time period, costs increased by 30-60% on average.
It cannot be overstated: these cost increases are deeply impacting local budgets. Further, they pose great risks to the financial sustainability of waste and recycling programs in Massachusetts, especially for resource-challenged communities.
Extended producer responsibility is one legislative lever to institute accountability and bolster recycling opportunities statewide. EPR was identified by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection as a valuable mechanism to address solid waste challenges in both the 2030 Solid Waste Master Plan and the 2021 Reduce and Reuse Action Plan. Other states that have pursued EPR have demonstrated enviable results, and we hope the Commonwealth can soon reap the same rewards.
We are very grateful to the Legislature for their efforts to create the Extended Producer Responsibility Commission (EPRC), which will further inform your work on EPR in the months to come.
Ahead of the EPRC’s final recommendations, we wish to affirm our support for several extended producer responsibility bills currently before you this session that would institute this time-tested framework for paint and paint cans, mattresses, batteries, electronics, and packaging and printed paper:
H. 886 and S. 647, An Act relative to paint recycling
H. 968 and S. 556, An Act Establishing a Lithium-Ion Battery Stewardship Program
S. 614, An Act to promote the future success of mattress recycling in the Commonwealth
H. 1023, An Act to establish a mattress recycling program in the Commonwealth
H. 3985, An Act relative to promoting the future success of mattress recycling in the Commonwealth
H. 1015 and S. 653, An Act to require producer responsibility for collection, reuse and recycling of discarded electronic products
H. 926, An Act to save recycling costs in the Commonwealth
S. 571, An Act to reduce waste and recycling costs in the Commonwealth
The MMA strongly supports H. 886 and S. 647, An Act relative to paint recycling. EPR for paint would greatly expand the locations and number of opportunities residents have to recycle paint. Many municipalities currently do not offer any sort of paint collection or recycling service, and recommend that residents dry out and dispose of latex paint in the trash, or only host collection events for hazardous oil-based paint a few times a year. This recyclable material could be safely diverted out of the municipal solid waste stream with no additional cost to municipal or state governments through EPR.
If this legislation was passed, a small, reasonable fee on new paint purchases would be instituted to cover costs to collect, transport, process, and recycle leftover, unwanted paint — regardless of when it was bought or its current condition. The results from other states with paint EPR programs show this process and investment is not only working, but also worthwhile for customers, residents, and businesses.
Information from PaintCare, the organization that operates all existing paint stewardship programs across the United States, reveals that 97.7% of the population in those states live within 15 miles of a drop-off site. The access and convenience of this recycling program far exceeds what municipal governments in Massachusetts and others can offer without dedicated funding and support from the state to expand existing services.
So far, PaintCare has collected about 78.8 million gallons of paint in other states. We envision a future where a paint extended producer responsibility program could greatly assist local governments and waste districts across the Commonwealth with the estimated 1,800,000 gallons of leftover paint they currently manage each year while providing more convenience and an added cost savings benefit.
Cities and towns repeatedly indicate that paint recycling would be a great starting point for permanent EPR programs in Massachusetts. A statewide paint recycling program, as the one that would be established by H. 886 and S. 647, remains a top legislative priority of the MMA.
A new effort we are pleased to support this session is H. 968 and S. 556, An Act Establishing a Lithium-Ion Battery Stewardship Program. This legislation would create an EPR program for lithium-ion batteries. Improper disposal of these batteries has recently been identified as the leading cause of fires at Material Recovery Facilities, or MRFs, and continues to pose challenges as fire hazards, according to the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services.
An extended producer responsibility framework for batteries is desperately needed given the threats battery fires could pose to sanitation workers, Department of Public Works staff, firefighters, and residents across the Commonwealth. Batteries can also release hazardous materials, including mercury and lead, into our environment, and education is needed to illustrate the dangers of improper disposal to residents and customers. H. 968 and S. 556 would provide for a public information campaign to get these dangerous materials out of trash streams and create battery recycling infrastructure that is not only safe but sustainably funded and much needed.
The MMA also supports several bills which would institute extended producer responsibility for mattresses: S. 614, An Act to promote the future success of mattress recycling in the Commonwealth, H. 1023, An Act to establish a mattress recycling program in the Commonwealth, and H. 3985, An Act relative to promoting the future success of mattress recycling in the Commonwealth.
These bills would bolster mattress recycling opportunities across the state following the MassDEP waste ban on mattresses that took effect on November 1, 2022. That ban led to the development of mattress recycling facilities across the state, which helped divert these big, bulky, and recyclable materials from ending up in landfills or incinerators. Despite that waste ban, this development also elevated the cost and convenience disparities residents encounter in their efforts to recycle mattresses.
EPR for mattresses is the policy solution that responds to continued municipal concerns about varied and patchwork pricing, service gaps, and a lack of stable municipal funding to support new recycling programs and contracts. This collection system would be available to all residents in the Commonwealth and would help to lower costs for your constituents.
We additionally support H. 1015 and S. 653, An Act to require producer responsibility for collection, reuse and recycling of discarded electronic products, H. 926, An Act to save recycling costs in the Commonwealth, and S. 571, An Act to reduce waste and recycling costs in the Commonwealth, which would provide for EPR systems for electronic products and packaging and paper products, respectively. We again offer our support to the Committee as you consider the various policy developments surrounding these pieces of legislation and remain committed to establishing EPR programs for these materials.
Plastics reduction
The MMA and its membership continue to support common-sense solutions to reduce plastic pollution. The widespread use of plastic, especially materials that negatively impact municipal wastewater and waste management equipment, pose continued challenges that cities and towns cannot tackle alone. We seek your support for the following provisions, and offer some comments to ensure these solutions enable progress in all corners of the Commonwealth.
H. 945 and S. 589, An Act protecting wastewater and sewerage systems through the labeling of non-flushable wipes, would assist all cities and towns that provide wastewater collection and transportation services. These disposable, premoistened wipes, while useful, often are marketed as flushable when that is far from the truth. Their packaging is in desperate need of regulation to keep these plastic, petrochemical-derived fibrous wipes out of treatment plants and septic tanks and to prevent backups and clogs from impacting your communities and wastewater treatment systems.
This legislation would require consistent “Do Not Flush” labeling on wipe products sold in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth would be following the lead of California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Washington, and Washington D.C. who have all passed similar legislation.
Another key component of this legislation’s future success is the consumer education component. At the moment, there is widespread confusion about what to do with these wipes, and H. 945 and S. 589 would provide for an education and outreach program to inform customers about the harmful and hazardous effects of flushing and reduce the misinformation causing this continued problem.
Wastewater collection and treatment is an essential form of pollution control that cities and towns bear responsibility for. A favorable report and passage of this legislation would be incredibly helpful to support these services statewide, and would result in municipal cost savings by reducing the frequency of clogs and backups caused by these plastic wipes.
Additionally, we continue to support bills relating to single-use plastics (H. 916 and S. 630) plastic bag reduction (H. 933 and S. 590). The MMA welcomes a baseline standard that a statewide single-use plastics ban and plastic bag policy would provide. However, we caution against any inclusion of clauses that would preempt local plastic bag policies, including language included in Section 3 of each of the aforementioned bills. We are concerned that such clauses would limit local progress already articulated in our communities.
On the whole, the MMA supports a statewide baseline ban on plastic bags, but we recognize also that local governments have led the way on this issue to date. They have dedicated time and effort to create local bag ban bylaws and ordinances that fit the unique needs of their communities and businesses. They may have accounting and financial policies that differ from the standards within these pieces of legislation that would be negatively impacted by the preemption of these local rules. We recommend the Joint Committee avoid creating a strict ceiling when municipal policies should be able to go above and beyond an imposed standard. We urge you to remove any preemptive language in future drafts of the legislation.
Summary
In conclusion, more structured, ongoing support is needed to bolster local recycling infrastructure across the Commonwealth. We can meet these challenges with targeted, reinforcing solutions that address the full lifecycle of products, from their manufacturing and marketing to disposal and recycling. These bills are the mechanisms to do this work and would benefit the Commonwealth, municipalities, and the residents we all serve with your careful consideration of the comments above.
We look forward to partnering with you on these important issues in the coming months. To support the dedicated efforts of cities and towns from Boston to the Berkshires, we respectfully urge you to provide these bills with a favorable report. If you have any questions or desire further information, please do not hesitate to have your office contact me or MMA Legislative Analyst Josie Ahlberg at jahlberg@mma.org at any time.
Sincerely,
Adam Chapdelaine
MMA Executive Director and CEO