There is certainly no shortage of duly enacted public policy in Colorado that elicits bouts of rueful head shaking. But it is the periodic instances of public policy being made via well-placed whispers — off the books, as it were — that make one question whether perhaps the founders got it wrong, and we ought to maybe just start all over again.

Back in 2022, Colorado’s legislature, hoping to shock some life into the state’s moribund recycling rate, passed an extended producer responsibility (EPR) bill, in which the government would levy a tax — sorry, a fee — on makers of things packaged in recyclable material — paper, plastic, glass and so forth. The revenue generated from that (sigh) fee goes to a third party — a “producer-responsibility organization”, dubbed the Circular Action Alliance (CAA) — for the purposes of establishing recycling programs for those materials, with an end goal of boosting recycling rates. The whole scheme is supervised by the state government. Let’s leave aside for now any queries to the effect of “what could possibly go wrong”, and leap ahead to present day.

This fall, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the state agency tasked with guardianship of the EPR program, was all set to approve the program, details of which were drafted and submitted after months of work and coordination with the CAA and manufacturers. Then they suddenly hit a curious snag.

Part of the state’s recycling plan cooked up by the CAA includes, as one would expect from an ambitious 21st-century recycling program, advanced recycling technologies, mostly designed to overcome the difficulties associated with plastics. Traditional mechanical recycling technologies do not work well with plastic films (like cling wrap), which literally gum up the works, or with particularly hard plastics of the type one encounters in packaging from time to time.

So, some bright folks conjured up a way to heat these plastics to temperatures sufficient to break them down into their component molecules, from which they can be rebuilt into something else useable. A scientific accounting system called “mass balance” can then track how much of this recycled plastic is going into whatever new thing is made. Pretty cool, right? The marriage of science and capitalism can produce some rather exceptional offspring; in this case, a solution to a major environmental dilemma, which comes gift-wrapped with a scientifically unassailable accounting method, and — in case anyone is keeping score on this — the opportunity for some additional local economic growth. Wins all around.

Well, not quite. Enter the Luddite wing of the environmental movement, which fancies itself the Eminence Gris of Colorado’s government. Of any group out there, you would think the environmental community, whose most dogmatic factions have been walking the streets sounding the tocsin over the Pompeii-level threat of plastic accumulation, would be excited by this development.

And yet here they are, at what amounts to the eleventh hour, tossing a wrench into the state’s nascent recycling plan. Their complaint? Why, that advanced chemical recycling is too new, too unproven and too expensive. It’s an argument, paradoxically, they categorically reject when it comes to the elusive wonder-battery technology which is necessary to make renewable energy remotely close to being able to provide sufficient baseline electrical generation. They also question the mass balance-based tracking system, which is on the order of questioning the use of mathematics to calculate quantifiable outcomes. So much for worshipping at the altar of science.

But solutions to problems are not really the goal of groups like this, who are animated less by exhortations to “reduce, reuse, and recycle” than by the urge to repeal the industrial revolution.
Whatever one thinks of the EPR as policy, it was begotten according to the established rules and procedures, brought into law via the legislative process, and the program developed and drafted in accordance with the directions that process vouchsafed its implementers. Suddenly, at the end of that process the extremist wing of the environmental movement stands up, turns a thumb down, and expects the whole thing to be thrown into disarray.

What is needed at this juncture is leadership, and true leadership here would call for the CDPHE to respect the process, approve the program as submitted, and unleash the innovative energies of American enterprise to pull Colorado’s recycling rate out of the single digits.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.