A chance to meaningfully reduce plastic packaging waste

March began with a victory for conservation, as 175 nations agreed to craft a global treaty that would stem the flow of plastic waste into nature. The bad news is the United States is far from ready to implement the kind of national waste plan called for under such a treaty. The good news is states like New York are blazing a trail for the rest of the country to follow, by pursuing policies that can deliver on this new ambition.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget includes a potential game-changer: a provision for Extended Producer Responsibility

(EPR) that would make producers and brands financially responsible for the recycling of consumer packaging.

Under an EPR framework, producers and brands would pay for the recycling of materials, and would be penalized for selling hard-to-recycle packaging or for not incorporating recycled content into their packaging portfolio. Over time, recycled content would become available and cost effective.

Consumers simply don’t need — nor do they want — so much waste. By making producers responsible for recycling, they would use less plastic, and use it more responsibly.

As a result of aging infrastructure, spotty access to recycling and the public’s widespread confusion over exactly what is recyclable, only 13 percent of plastic packaging in the

United States currently ends up recycled and only 2 percent achieves circularity — that is, where the product ultimately becomes the same product again. The rest accumulates in landfills, communities and nature, to devastating effect. Over 11 million metric tons of plastic waste ends up in our oceans every year, and global plastic production is on track to double

to their inner circles than to their outer circles. Dunbar found that over the course of a month, people devote about 8 1/2 hours to each of their five closest friends, and they devote a bit more than two hours a month (basically a dinner or a lunch) to the next 10 who complete their 15-person circle. They devote, on average, less than 20 minutes a month to the other 135 people in their larger friend circle.

These are averages. We each have our own friendship style. Extroverts spend their social energy across more people and have more but weaker close friendships. Introverts invest in fewer people but have stronger ties to them.

The other crucial factor in friendship is social skill, and this is something that, as a society, we don’t take seriously enough. This has become a passionate conviction for me over the past decade. Social life is fast, complex and incredibly demanding cognitively. Americans have only recently begun to teach social and emotional skills in schools, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that online life erodes those skills.

But our happiness in life, as well as our health and fulfillment, is hugely dependent on our ability to be skillfully understanding of and considerate toward others. A lot of the bitterness and alienation in our country flows from the fact that our social skills are inadequate to the complex society we now live in.

Psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson identified some of the social actions on which friendships are based: standing up for friends when they are not around, sharing important news with them, confiding vulnerabilities with them, providing emotional support when it’s needed.

A lot of the important skills are day-today communications skills: throwing the conversation back and forth without interrupting, adding something meaningful to what the other person just said, telling jokes, reminiscing about the past, anticipating how the other person might react to your comment so you can frame it in a way that’s most helpful.

Dunbar and his colleagues Neil Duncan and Anna Marriott sampled conversations other people were having in coffee shops and other venues and found that twothirds of the conversation time was spent talking about social topics. Dunbar’s research also suggests that the average person can expect to have a close relationship break down about every 2.3 years. That’s roughly 30 relationship breakdowns over an adulthood — usually over things like lack of care and poor communication.

I find Dunbar’s work fascinating, though like so much of the social sciences, it focuses on what can be quantified across populations, so it misses what is particular and unique about each friendship.

Most of this research was done many years ago. Reading it in the context of COVID, I often had a sense that I was glimpsing a lost world. Everything seems so fragile. As we gradually slog back to normal life, this might be the moment to take a friendship inventory, and to be aggressively friendly.