The California State Assembly is expected to vote this week on a bill that would phase out some of the plastics used in online shipping because they clog up landfills and harm marine life.

Assembly Bill 2026 would force companies mailing packages to and from California to find more sustainable packaging and phase out plastic mailers, bubble wrap, air pillows, molded polystyrene and loose fill such as packaging peanuts.

Ashley Blacow-Draeger, Pacific policy and communications manager for the nonprofit conservation group Oceana, said most of these items never get recycled.

"The majority of that is landfilled and makes its way into the environment where it harms marine life," she said, "and it also interferes with the ability to recycle, as it contaminates recycling, it gums up the machines."

Friday is the deadline to pass any and all bills out of the Assembly. Opponents have said manufacturers would have to spend money to switch over to new packaging types, which could result in higher prices for consumers. Supporters have noted that Amazon already has moved to eliminate plastic packaging in India and has announced plans to do so in Germany.

Blacow-Draeger said a huge amount of plastic ends up in the ocean, where it can lead marine life to suffocate or starve.

"They can choke on the plastic pieces when ingested, or it can create a false sense of feeling full," she said. "And so, they feel like they've been eating their natural food in the ocean - but in fact, their stomachs are being filled with plastic pieces."

The bill would make exceptions for plastics used in shipping certain medicines, medical devices and some types of food.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund is urging Google to allow Chromebook owners a right to repair the devices and extend their life span, reducing e-waste and saving money for schools in Georgia and across the country.

With 31.8 million Chromebooks sold in 2020, many of which were distributed to schools during the pandemic, many of the devices are approaching expiration and will soon stop receiving updates.

Lucas Gutterman, Designed to Last campaign director for the group, said to prevent the loss of working devices, they are calling on Google to double the life expectancy of Chromebooks, an effort which could save Georgia schools millions of dollars.

"Our report actually found that doubling the life of Chromebook from four to eight years could save schools in Georgia $63 million and cut carbon emission equivalent to taking 32,000 cars off the road a year," Gutterman explained.

Gutterman warned as operating system expiration dates approach, Chromebooks will become a dangerous form of e-waste. Studies have shown e-waste accounts for more than 70% of toxic material in our waste stream, causing cancer, fertility problems, developmental delays and other health risks.

According to a survey conducted last year by the National Consortium for School Networking in 2022, many schools have implemented a one-to-one program, providing each student with their own device.

However, Gutterman highlighted the potential loss of security access for the laptops could result in schools losing access to critical sites.

"Chromebooks have an expiration date after that date has passed," Gutterman pointed out. "Even though the laptop might be working perfectly fine, you can't access state testing websites, other secure websites and, for a lot of schools, that laptop is not really going to meet their needs."

In addition to saving schools money, the report estimated across the 48.1 million K-12 public school students in the U.S., doubling the life span of Chromebooks could result in $1.8 billion dollars in savings for taxpayers, assuming no additional maintenance costs.


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By Caleigh Wells for KCRW.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Chanalisa Sera navigates a forklift around hundreds of boxes of clothes in a Commerce warehouse. Some are tattered and worn out, others haven’t been used at all. Her job: to keep them from going to a landfill.

Sera works for Homeboy Threads, a new for-profit arm of the mission-driven organization that rehabilitates and trains formerly gang-affiliated and incarcerated people.

“I learned the forklift, I learned how to input weights and data entry into the computers,” Sera says of her job. “I learned how to sell things online, on e-com. I never, never in my life thought I would know how to do any of that stuff.”

Sera started as a trainee with Homeboy Industries a year and a half ago and became the first full-time employee at Homeboy Threads. Now she supervises the next cohort of trainees and teaches them what she’s learned.

The trucks bringing in loads of clothes for Sera to sort are filled with company inventory that didn’t sell, rolls of fabric that didn’t get used, or worn materials that customers returned to the store.

Homeboy can profit in a few ways: They can just sort the clothes for a company and hand them back; fix or sew new clothes and sell them; sell the raw materials to be recycled into a new medium, such as insulation. 

Homeboy Threads CEO Chris Zwicke explains it’s a labor-intensive process: “Sorting out all the different pieces: what's used, what could be resold, what needs to be repaired, or what's completely beyond salvage and needs to be recycled.”

Some of the clothes in the warehouse belong to the clothing company GUESS. It worked with Homeboy for more than a year in a pilot project before it publicly announced its launch last week. 

“Initially we started the pilot with store returns, damages, irregular product,” explains Director of Brand Partnerships Nicolai Marciano. “Since the launch of our pilot program in December 2021, Homeboy’s received over 200,000 pounds of garments to avoid ending up in landfill.”

Textiles are California’s fastest growing landfill waste. U.S. consumers toss about 81 pounds of clothes every year, and buy a new piece of clothing every five or six days. That’s about five times as much as we were buying 40 years ago. 

But Zwicke says he’s seeing more consumers and companies who want to know where their unsellable clothes are ending up. “Corporations are more sensitive to the idea now that there is no ‘away’ when you throw something away. It's actually going somewhere.”

Homeboy Threads is coming online just in time. California politicians introduced a bill this year called the Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2023, which would require producers to figure out how to collect and recycle reusable clothes and textiles. That means there could be a spike in demand for authorized collectors to do all that sorting and repair for companies.

“It's a gap in the market that we've seen, and that we're filling kind of with our workforce development mission,” says Zwicke. “We're here to create jobs, and there's a lot of kind of manual work that goes into what we do.”



Caleigh Wells wrote this article for KCRW.


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A bill in the Tennessee Legislature aims to reduce packaging materials that end up in landfills by improving recycling in the Volunteer State.

One recent survey ranks Tennessee 47th among states for recycling, with only 7% of common containers and packaging recycled.

Senate Bill 573 would require reducing unnecessary packaging, and reclaiming more valuable materials in the recycling process. It would also support and develop markets for recycled materials.

Dan Firth chairs the Solid Waste and Mining Committee for the Sierra Club's Tennessee chapter, and said these improvements would result in cleaner air and water as well.

"This bill is focused on reducing the amount of packaging waste that is going into landfills, being incinerated and otherwise lost," said Firth. "And to ensure that those valuable materials that the packaging is made of is recovered and goes back into the circular economy."

The bill would establish an advisory board to conduct a statewide assessment of how recycling infrastructure and services could be improved. It is sponsored by state Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Oak Hill.

Firth emphasized that the bill would provide financial stability to local recycling systems, enabling investment in recycling infrastructure and creating local jobs.

He noted that it could also enhance Tennessee's business prospects by ensuring a domestic supply of raw materials for new products.

"In order to collect more materials, there will have to be more jobs to do that work - to do the collection, to do the transportation, to do the processing," said Firth. "There'll be more jobs in terms of using those materials that are collected, and making new products."

Firth said the bill would also reimburse towns for some of the related costs of their recycling programs.