Within days of California\u2019s long-anticipated single use plastic law going into effect, environmentalists and anti-waste activists announced they plan to sue.<\/p>\n
They say Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s administration and CalRecycle inserted exemptions <\/a>favoring the plastic industry into the law\u2019s regulations that weaken it and undermine legislative intent.<\/p>\n \u201cThese new rules create huge loopholes for plastic packaging that violate the law,\u201d said Avinash Kar, senior director of the toxics program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. \u201cWe expect to challenge this in court.\u201d<\/p>\n The suit, which has not yet been filed, is supported by NRDC and Californians Against Waste, a Sacramento-based waste organization.<\/p>\n On the other side, the packaging industry also is unhappy with the law, and although it has not officially announced its intent to sue, \u201cour members have real concerns about cost, compliance, and constitutionality,\u201d said Matt Clarke, spokesman for the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors, which sued Oregon earlier this year<\/a> over a similar waste law. <\/p>\n CalRecycle did not respond in time for publication.<\/p>\n The environmental organizations say the new final regulations open the door to what is known as \u201cchemical recycling,\u201d which produces large amounts of hazardous waste. The law also contains problematic exemptions for certain categories of plastic foodware, they say. <\/p>\n The language of the law forbids any kind of recycling that would produce significant amounts of hazardous waste. The new regulations allow for these recycling methods if the facilities are properly permitted. <\/p>\n The new regulations also exempt certain products if they are already covered by federal law. For instance, a packaging company, retailer or distributor can claim that they have such a preemption, Kar said, and CalRecycle might not immediately review that claim. \u201cAnd as long as they don\u2019t review it, they\u2019ll get the exemption for as long as CalRecycle doesn\u2019t review it,\u201d creating a potential \u201cforever loophole.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cCalifornians were promised a system where producers take real responsibility for the waste they create,\u201d said Nick Lapis, advocacy director for Californians Against Waste. \u201cWhen regulations introduce broad exemptions and redefine key terms, that promise starts to erode. The details matter here, and right now they don\u2019t line up with the intent of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, was signed by Newsom in 2022<\/a>. It was considered landmark legislation because it addressed the scourge of single-use plastics, requiring plastic and packaging companies to use less of them and ensuring that by 2032, all food packaging is either recyclable or compostable. <\/p>\n Accumulating plastic waste<\/a> is overwhelming waterways and oceans<\/a>, sickening marine life and threatening human health<\/a>.<\/p>\n The law\u2019s intent was not only to reduce it, but also to put the onus and cost of dealing with it on packaging producers and manufacturers, not consumers and local governments. It was supposed to incentivize companies to consider the fate of their products and spur innovation in material redesign.<\/p>\n According to one state analysis<\/a>, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale, or distributed during 2023 in California.<\/p>\n Similar laws have been passed in Maine, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington. In some of those states, however, the laws have been challenged by product manufacturers and others. Oregon\u2019s law is on hold while a lawsuit by the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors works its way through the courts<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see a lot of the same problems in California that we flagged in Oregon,\u201d said Clarke, the trade group spokesman. \u201cGiven California\u2019s scale, the cost implications are going to be even larger. Our legal counsel has noted that California\u2019s proposed fees are already higher than what other states have put forward.\u201d<\/p>\n Jan Dell of Last Beach Cleanup, an anti-plastic waste group based in Laguna Beach, doesn\u2019t believe the law will work \u2014 irrespective of the final regulations \u2014 and said the \u201cexorbitant\u201d cost of its implementation will either spur producers to sue, or they\u2019ll end up passing the higher costs onto consumers.<\/p>\n