California's stalled plastics plan will come back. Here's what it could mean.

California's plan to put steep recycling requirements on single-use packaging may have stalled in the state Legislature for this year.

But given the state's huge market, and given that the plan's supporters are keen on trying again, the debate is certain to come back. And the effects of whatever lawmakers do are likely to be felt beyond the Golden State.

The plan's backers include 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 it had substantial industry opposition, it had the support a lot of cities and some in the waste management industry. The final version even had the support of plastics maker Dow Inc.

Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, the bill's lead author in the Senate, said in a Sept. 16 statement that he plans to continue talking with interested groups in the next few months and "remains committed" to moving legislation.

So what were the details of the bill that stalled and what could the state do going forward?

The stalled plan would have required a 75 percent recycling rate for all single-use packaging, not just plastics, sold in the state by 2030. That would have started in 2026 with a 30 percent recycling rate and ramped up.

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.

Other industry lobbyists, like Shannon Crawford, director of state government affairs with the Plastics Industry Association, predicted that bill would have had "a significant impact, I think that's pretty safe to say, but this is an instance where the devil is in the details."

If the lawmakers return with a similar approach, it would have real teeth. The version that stalled called for penalties of up to $50,000 a day against non-compliant companies, although it included a number of "off ramps" and provisions for corrective action plans.

In some ways, the bill's basic approach was to set performance standards for single-use packaging recycling at levels that are currently unheard of in the United States. It would define the problem and hope that the threat of penalties or loss of market access for certain types of packaging would prompt new solutions.

The legislators hoped to push changes with things like product redesign or having the industry voluntarily forming extended producer responsibility systems. The bill included language allowing CalRecycle to evaluate and approve those systems.

It's clear that a lot of plastic packaging as it is used today likely would have had real challenges.

The bill's authors, for example, said less than 9 percent of plastics is recycled today. The most recycled plastics packaging, the PET bottle, had a 73 percent recycling rate in California in 2017, thanks to the state's bottle bill.

Many types of plastics packaging are well below thresholds. Polypropylene bottles under California's container deposit system, for example, had only a 9 percent recycling rate in 2017. That deposit system itself is under financial strain.

The law's authors say the legislation is needed to help cities cope with growth in packaging waste, including hard-to-recycle flexible and multilayer film and pouch packaging.

They say that California cities spend over $420 million a year to clean up litter, and they argue that bans on recycled scrap imports by Asian countries, starting with China in 2017, mean they've lost key markets for plastic and paper exports and now have to spend more tax dollars on waste management.

"Our environment is being overrun by litter, our local governments are being flooded by waste and our communities can't afford to clean up what is happening today," said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, one of the lead authors.

In interviews before the bill stalled, officials with the American Chemistry Council said they believed new chemical recycling technologies would be key to meeting a 75 percent recycling target.

"If we're going to get to these super ambitious targets, we're going to have to expand our thinking as to what sort of technologies may be available," Shestek said. "We've been suggesting there's going to have to be kind of a fresh look needed."

One area of focus for the plastics industry's technical research will be flexible packaging.

Keith Christman, ACC's managing director of plastic markets, said improving recycling of flexible materials, both in traditional mechanical recycling systems and chemical recycling, is important.

And beyond recycling, ACC argued that any detailed implementation rules should also consider that flexible packaging can have other environmental benefits, like lightweighting to meet source reduction goals. That's another target of the legislation, which requires producers to reduce waste from single-use packaging 75 percent by 2030, using source reduction, recycling and composting.

Industry hopes new technologies can address recycling concerns around those newer types of packaging.

"Our goal is to make those additional types of packages recyclable and make them meet the goals," Christman said, adding that "we think there are other sustainability benefits beyond recycling that will still be important."

As well, Crawford said industry officials raised concerns about the proposal's potential to, as they saw it, stifle packaging innovation. She said lawmakers said they recognized that.

But a steady parade of environmental groups and lobbyists for local governments and waste management groups also made their voices known, including at a last-minute hearing Sept. 10, saying they need help with the financial implications of problematic packaging.

Allen echoed that: "We do remain really committed to working with everybody and seeing if we can get there because at the end of the day, this is such an enormous problem. The issues keep getting worse, the bottom line keeps getting more problematic."

One of the more powerful opponents of the bill that stalled, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, urged lawmakers to come back with a different plan. It said it supported the goals of addressing "packaging waste, especially single-use plastics," but said shortcomings in the current recycling system should be fixed and then minimum recycling rates should be hashed out.

It's too soon to say whether the discussion will be able to come to a compromise that satisfies enough parties. But the debate and legislative tussling will be back.