California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill that aims to limit some recycled plastic bottles in the state from being used in making carpets, a first-in-the-U.S. provision that supporters say will boost recycled PET for beverage packaging.
The PET bottle provision is a small part of a much larger law, known as Assembly Bill 863, to reform the state's carpet recycling system. Newsom announced late Sept. 27 that he had signed the bill into law.
The new law requires carpet makers to have 5 percent recycled content from used carpets in their products sold in the state by 2028, and does not allow them to count recycled material from PET bottles toward meeting that.
Supporters said the carpet law will help preserve recycled PET bottles so that more are available for beverage makers to meet a mandate under another California law, AB-793, to have 50 percent recycled content by 2030 in plastic bottles covered by the state's container deposit system.
"Beverage bottlers, like Niagara, are leading the way in increasing recycled content in our plastic bottles while also under some of the strictest recycling content mandates; therefore, bottlers need as much #1 plastic from the marketplace as possible," said Brian Hess, executive vice president of Niagara Bottling LLC, in a Sept. 29 statement from the National Stewardship Action Council, which was a sponsor of AB-863.
"Unfortunately, carpet manufacturers are using about 30 percent of that valuable #1 plastic in carpets," said Hess. "AB-863 calls for carpet-to-carpet recycling ensuring the availability of more #1 plastic bottles made from recycled content."
NSAC said about one-third of plastic water bottles in the United States are recycled into carpet and that AB-863 would help "to keep food-grade plastic such as water bottles at their highest and best use as recycled, food-grade materials."
The provision was also supported by the International Bottled Water Association, which said in a letter to California state lawmakers in August, ahead of their final vote on the bill, that the legislation would help ensure that more "high-quality, food-grade post-consumer plastic such as [PET] water bottles" are available for bottle-to-bottle closed loop recycling.
Earlier versions of AB-863 had required up to 30 percent carpet-to-carpet recycled content in new carpets by 2035, but that was dropped to 5 percent by 2028 in the final language.
Apart from the plastic bottle provision, the carpet manufacturing industry criticized the larger law, saying that it will replace the state's existing carpet recycling program with something that is "untested, unproven and more costly."
The Carpet and Rug Institute said the state's current program has increased the carpet recycling rate from 4 percent in 2012 to 41 percent in 2024.
"The passage of AB-863 is detrimental to the state of California, California consumers and the entire carpet industry, and it upends progress that has been made by the industry to advance the state's ambitious environmental goals," said CRI President Russ DeLozier, who added that the carpet industry nonetheless looked forward to working with all parties to try to improve the carpet recycling program.
But NSAC and the law's chief author, state Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters, said the carpet recycling program was not meeting targets.
Since 2011, California consumers have paid a recycling fee for carpet, but the program has not generated enough material, causing financial problems for recyclers, NSAC said.
"Even with constant intervention and enforcement actions by CalRecycle and the California legislature, [the industry's] failure to successfully manage California's carpet recycling program has resulted in more carpet in landfills, wasted consumer fee money, constant litigation with the state, and serious damage to recycling infrastructure in this state," said Aguiar-Curry, in a statement from NSAC.