Yesterday, Martin Bourque, an AMBR executive and Director of the Ecology Center, joined elected officials, businesses, environmental leaders, and community advocates at the Capitol to urge Governor Newsom and CalRecycle to implement California’s landmark plastic pollution and producer responsibility law, SB 54 (Allen, 2022), as written, negotiated and enacted. This comes as CalRecycle prepares its second attempt at formal rulemaking to implement the law.
On behalf of AMBR and the Ecology Center, Martin told the press:
As recyclers, we bear the brunt of the poor but profitable packaging decisions of brands and retailers. SB 54 was supposed to fix that. That’s why we supported it. We fought to ensure there would be strong state oversight to ensure the law would do what the people intended. That’s not what is happening.
We’ve spent the last three years engaged in negotiations and a public rule-making process in good faith. Those rules were tossed aside due to industry pressure, and the new proposed rules seek to rewrite 50 years of established recycling law.
The categorical exclusions are a massive loophole for most plastic packaging to escape this law. Rewriting the law to make plastic-to-fuel schemes count as recycling is an abomination. And seeking to collect flexible and film packaging in curbside bins will pollute our best recycled commodity–paper and cardboard–for decades to come.
As recyclers we have three top line demands:
- Eliminate Categorical Exclusions
Recyclers don’t have the luxury of excluding packaging categories from our carts; if it makes it into our carts, it should be covered. Specific exemptions should only be granted on an essential use, case-by-case, and time-limited basis.
- Keep Flex and Film Packaging Out of Curbside Collection
Bags, pouches, and wrappers are prohibitively expensive to collect and sort. Post-consumer flex and film packaging has minuscule, problematic, and unstable markets. And these plastic contaminants can never be fully removed from the paper and cardboard, even at the most modern recycling facilities.
When California’s paper reaches developing nations, as most of it does, all that plastic embedded in the paper bales is burned at the mill, in under-regulated cement kilns, in informal sector backyard industries like lye and tofu production, or just plain dumped. It is better to put it in a landfill in California than divert harm to poor people in developing nations.
Currently, major brands, retailers, petrochemical companies, and industry groups are spending millions of dollars to convince the public, regulators, and elected officials that this plastic garbage can be recycled in the curbside cart. It can’t.
Brands, if you want to keep selling these pouches, wrappers, and bags as packaging, then pay for making them truly circular through reusables, sustainable substitutions, deposit return systems, buy back, drop off, or return to sender programs, or other alternative collection methods. This is what the law demands. Curbside recycling is not the answer to your plastic packing crisis.
- Don’t Call Burning Plastic “Recycling”
They tell us so-called ”advanced recycling” will solve this. Well, “advanced recycling” is NEITHER! It is dirty old 20th century petrochemical technology warmed over. There is nothing ADVANCED about burning plastic. And burning it certainly is not recycling.
Chemical recycling relies on public subsidy and exemption from regulation to begin to pencil out. In the best cases at scale today, it competes with mechanical recycling for the highest grade materials to produce the lowest grade fuels. This is not the way forward. And this is certainly NOT recycling.
Recyclers are clear: We cannot recycle our way out of the plastic packaging crisis.
Californians have been clear that they want: Strong, transformative action on plastic packaging.