As California regulators start to write detailed rules for a new green packaging labeling law, a coalition of environmental groups said April 2 it wants the state to strictly enforce the law and crack down on contaminated plastic waste exports.
The letter from the coalition of nongovernmental organizations to CalRecycle and California Attorney General Rob Bonta came before the state closed a comment period April 2 on its new recyclability labeling law, known as Senate Bill 343.
The groups make some specific recommendations, such as asking the state to separate PET thermoforms from PET bottles in recycling bales and asking CalRecycle to "correct errors" in its reporting on the number of municipal recycling facilities that sort polypropylene bales.
"Plastic producers may try to use the false findings to turn SB-343 into a 'lies-in-labeling' law," said the environmental groups, which include The Last Beach Cleanup, the Surfrider Foundation, the Basel Action Network and organizations in Mexico, Malaysia, Nigeria and Thailand.
CalRecycle, which is charged with implementing SB-343 and a related extended producer responsibility law known as Senate Bill 54, released preliminary reports in December 2023 suggesting that many rigid plastic containers could meet stricter recyclability standards, but flexible packaging likely would not.
The NGOs also want the state to crack down on allowing local governments to claim diversion credits for exporting plastic waste bales — including items sent to Mexico — that are too contaminated to meet export standards under state laws and international standards.
"CalRecycle's false approach to determine sortation of plastics must be corrected to ensure truthful packaging labels under SB-343, which also ensures truthful determination of what is recyclable under California's SB-54," said Jan Dell, founder of the Last Beach Cleanup.
California officials plan to hold a public hearing on implementation of SB-343 and release an updated report after that, but a CalRecycle official at a Feb. 13 hearing on the law suggested exports were beyond the scope of SB-343's labeling provisions.
But some of the environmental groups argue that California has used exports of contaminated waste to artificially inflate its diversion rates and want Bonta and CalRecycle to use the new laws to crack down on that.
"Californians pushed hard for laws that would make California's recycling programs compatible with the Basel Convention, a global treaty which controls global dumping of wastes," said Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network. "Yet now we have discovered that rather than implementing the law as they are charged to do, CalRecycle appears intent on ignoring it while providing pathways to push California waste to Mexico."