California’s plan to put steep recycling requirements on single-use packaging had backers that included influential lawmakers like the majority leader of the state Assembly, who vowed Sept. 14, the day the bill stalled, to bring it up again next year.
While that would have been seven years away, the challenge for industry is that much of the plastic packaging in use now would have a hard time with those requirements.
The law would have put a lot of responsibility on brand owners, and they could have potentially faced tough choices, such as should they work to increase the recycling rate of the packaging they use now, or should they switch to something with a higher recycling rate? And how would consumer react?
It’s impossible to answer those questions today because the law would have set out a four-year process where the state agency CalRecycle would write detailed rules. Nothing would have happened immediately.
But industry officials said that with the state’s huge market — California would be the world’s fifth largest economy if it were its own country — whatever the state does could become nationwide rules, in practice, if not in law.
“Some companies have looked at California as your de facto national standard and I would presume that what you ultimately get enacted here, the big product companies are ultimately going to be manufacturing for this standard across the country,” said Tim Shestek, the Sacramento, Calif.-based senior director of state affairs for the American Chemistry Council.
“It would be surprising to me that you would have a just a California clamshell or flexible packaging that’s just for California and a different one for the rest of the country,” he said.