Photograph by Greg C. Holland / Connected Archives
words by miranda green
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: It’s a slogan virtually all of my generation learned alongside nursery rhymes and lessons about being courteous to friends and the planet. But the phrase rings a bit hollow, as I revealed in a previous newsletter, because the vast majority of plastics that are made never get recycled—and a much smaller percentage gets recycled more than once.
Recycling has historically been run as a marketplace, where certain plastics hold value and companies pay for recyclable products to turn into other goods. But not every plastic is valued equally. Clear plastics from items such as water bottles fetch more on the market than pigmented plastics you see on products like white milk jugs, which means much of the latter goes straight into landfills. Further, even recyclable plastic has a shelf life: Very few kinds can be recycled multiple times; even fewer last 10 cycles before their polymer chains break down.
Since the plastics boom, the world has faced the question of what to do with unwanted bags, bottles, straws, and other single-use items once they serve their primary purpose. Several cities and states are already pushing for accountability from manufacturers for allegedly making false marketing promises about plastics.
But there’s been another line of thought: If many plastics reach landfills after just one use, how do we stop them from being made in the first place?
New California regulations aim to address that. The official rules for the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, also known as Senate Bill 54, were signed into effect on May 1 and put the onus on plastic producers to ensure by 2032 that 100% of single-use packaging and plastic food service sold in the state is recyclable or compostable.
Similar laws have been passed in Maryland, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, Washington, and Minnesota. But the California bill is already facing controversy.
It’s been a long road to final regulations on the landmark California bill. SB 54 was signed into law in 2022 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, establishing the state as the first to mandate comprehensive Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging.
But environmentalists see the final rules as much weaker than promised. The critiques come down to what are widely considered giant loopholes undermining the plastic reduction goals of SB 54 regulations. For one, manufacturers can utilize “chemical recycling” to meet their goals, which environmentalists argue produces large amounts of hazardous waste; in another, the regulations are written in such a way as to apply to all plastic packaging in California unless overridden by federal law. In the latter, many claim, the door is open for exemption claims by virtually all manufacturers.
“These regulations ignore explicit limits on recycling technologies and create permanent escape hatches the law never authorized,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste, in a statement. “CalRecycle’s original draft regulations were already not strong enough to ensure the systemic change that the public expected from this law, but the agency’s final regulations added even more loopholes to protect the status quo for producers of plastic packaging.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council is vowing to sue.
On the other side of the issue, manufacturers are also unhappy. “Our members have real concerns about cost, compliance, and constitutionality,” Matt Clarke, spokesman for the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, told the Los Angeles Times. A lawsuit brought by the association put Oregon’s plastics law on hold earlier this year.
One group established to oversee the implementation of the law on behalf of the plastic industry estimates that disposal costs will rise by six to 14 times for common products. Critics predict the financial burden of those costs will ultimately be passed down from the industry to consumers via increased prices for plastic products.
No one disputes the growing concern and impacts of plastic pollution.
A 2024 report from California’s attorney general estimated that cities in the state spend more than $1 billion each year on litter management, and found that 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic in 2023 were sold or distributed.
Numbers are just as stark nationally and globally. Plastic production is expected to more than double in the coming decades, with the United States anticipated to generate 1 billion more tons of plastic by 2040. An analysis by the PEW Charitable Trusts estimates recycling costs will drive a projected 30% increase in overall waste management expenses, to the tune of $37 billion each year for American taxpayers by 2040.
That metric doesn’t take into account any burdens manufacturers claim the new rule could put on consumers, which means it’s looking like consumers will foot the bill one way or the other, whether manufacturers also have to play a part in it or not.
Without a perfect solution for addressing the plastics crisis, the outstanding question remains who will pay for it: manufacturers, consumers, or the planet.
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The Plastic Reckoning Is Here
