Tell the legislature: Keep Plastic Out of Our Soil!

In 2012, in response to overflowing landfills, Vermont passed Act 148 – the Universal Recycling Law (URL). Part of this law included a ban on throwing away food in landfills, and a requirement to separate food scraps from their packaging at the source of generation.

Unfortunately, this law is not being enforced as written, with the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) allowing operation of "depackaging" machines to handle food scraps, contaminating the resulting compostable product with microplastics, and making the now shredded plastic packaging unfit for recycling.

ANR should not enable further waste in our landfills and incinerators, or allow contamination of our crop growing soils - join us in calling on the legislature to take swift action!

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Petition Language

We, the undersigned, are deeply concerned about the Agency of Natural Resources' (ANR) recent reinterpretation of sections of the Universal Recycling Law (“URL”), and we call on the Legislature to protect food scraps and soils from contamination, and ensure recyclable packaging is recycled.

Mechanically separated food scraps processed through a depackager are contaminated with large amounts of microplastics which make their way into the soil. The mechanically separated plastic packaging is too contaminated to recycle, meaning it must be incinerated or dumped in a landfill.

Knowingly allowing microplastics and other pollutants to be applied to our soils is not acceptable and may result in unresolvable soil contamination and public health concerns.

We believe the shocking disparity between the Agency's reinterpretation of the law and the actual content of the law deserves swift reaction from the Legislature.