California’s new plastic recycling rules spark fights from all sides

California just gave plastic producers until 2032 to make all their packaging recyclable or compostable — the most ambitious deadline in the country. Advocates say it doesn’t go far enough. Producers say it goes too far. At least one of them is threatening to sue.

The sweeping regulations, finalized at the start of the month, put producers in a bind that has no obvious solution. Plastic clamshell containers, for instance, protect berries from being crushed and keep them fresher, longer until they reach a refrigerator. Plastic producers say there’s simply no substitute — yet under the new rules, they’ll have to find one.

Last week, two environmental groups — the Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians Against Waste — said they plan to take California to court. Their argument: the state’s rules actually break the law by allowing recycling methods that create a lot of toxic waste, and by letting some plastics slip through the rules entirely. On the other side, plastic manufacturers say the rules go too far and will make products more expensive for shoppers.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat from coastal Los Angeles County who authored the plastic waste law, said the program still “massively moves the needle on this really major problem” — even if the process was messy. “This was the product of a compromise, and it was not perfect, and everybody walked away from the table, you know, unhappy about various aspects,” Allen said.

“California is the United States, but 30 years in the future,” said Joe Árvai, director of the University of Southern California’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. “What’s happening now is emblematic of trends that we are seeing worldwide … and the U.S. needs to adapt in the way that those countries are adapting in order to remain globally competitive.”

Less plastic, more recycling

For decades, the burden of reducing, reusing and recycling plastic waste has fallen on consumers. Once a consumer buys a product, they decide what happens to it — whether it ends up in the garbage can or the recycling blue bin — and their tax dollars fund recycling systems we have today.

In 2022, California’s landmark Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, shifted that responsibility to businesses. The regulations outline what materials are covered by the law and who counts as a “producer” of plastic waste.

The new regulations are a huge milestone, said Anja Brandon, director of U.S. plastics policy for the Ocean Conservancy. “There’s plenty more steps on this journey, but I’m just really excited that we are going to start making real progress,” she said.

The law applies to plastic food service ware and almost all single-use packaging — from the plastic wrap around large pallets of products shipped to retailers to a tube of toothpaste and the cardboard box around it.

Our broken recycling system

Most of the plastic packaging Californians throw away isn’t recycled — and that’s not your fault as a consumer. For decades, the revolving green arrows symbol has urged consumers tp do a better job of reducing, reusing and recycling. But the system itself started out broken, and got worse.

When people toss items into recycling bins, workers at recycling centers sort through them. Contaminated items — like a peanut butter tub with residue still inside — go straight to the landfill. Manufacturers buy clean, valuable materials like water bottles and detergent tubs and turn them into new products.

But a slew of other trash isn’t valuable enough to sell. It ends up in landfills, too.

In 2021, the plastic recycling rate was only 6% nationwide, according to a report by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics. That’s down from 8% in 2018, partly because China and other countries that used to buy our trash have stopped doing so. In California, most plastic packaging types are recycled at strikingly low rates, according to a 2025 CalRecycle report: Even milk jugs and detergent bottles, among the most commonly recycled plastics, reached only 19%, while most others came in at single digits or below.

To carry out the law, the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery appointed the Circular Action Alliance, a nonprofit that helps states carry out extended producer responsibility mandates, as the organizing body for producers. The alliance is responsible for coming up with a plan to meet the law’s goals.

Producers — defined as companies that make more than $1 million in sales and produce products packaged in plastic or own brands under which those products are sold — must join the organization and pay fees to fund waste management. They can meet the law’s requirements by using less plastic, finding alternative materials, or investing in recycling infrastructure.

“The biggest challenge is the scale and coordination required to modernize a complex recycling system across a state as large and diverse as California,” said Sheila Estaniel, a spokesperson for the Circular Action Alliance, in an email.

California’s requirement that businesses reduce single-use plastic altogether makes it one of the strongest plastic waste laws in the country. It also goes further than other similar laws because it requires plastic producers to pay $5 billion over a decade to address the environmental damage their products have caused to communities — though the state doesn’t expect to start distributing those funds until 2027 at the earliest.

Watered down rules

The plastic waste rules have had a rocky road to implementation.

In 2024, CalRecycle developed a first draft of regulations detailing what plastic the law covers and what producers must do. The draft expired before CalRecycle finalized it. In 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom directed regulators to rewrite the rules — a move that some advocates say say food and agriculture lobbyists pushed for.

The result was a second draft that carved out a broad exclusion for plastics used for food and agriculture purposes, covering products under the jurisdiction of the FDA and USDA, such as packaging for fresh produce and supplements. Advocates said the exclusion gutted the law.

“Governor Newsom was clear when he asked CalRecycle to restart these regulations that they should work to minimize costs for small businesses and families — while ensuring California’s bold recycling law can achieve the critical goal of cutting plastic pollution,” said Anthony Martinez, a spokesperson for the governor. “That’s exactly what these draft regulations do.”

CalRecycle submitted that draft to the Office of Administrative Law in August 2025, but withdrew it to make changes that narrowed that exclusion. Regulators ultimately excluded only plastic that federal law requires for food safety — walking back a broader carve-out that advocates said would have gutted the law.

Advocates gear up to sue

Not all plastics follow the same rules — and advocates object to the state’s two-track system.

Some materials with unique technical challenges can apply for exemptions, but must meet specific criteria to qualify.

Others, like plastic that federal law requires for food safety, escape the rules entirely once producers complete an application to CalRecycle — no timeline, no obligations.

“In practice, this allows exclusions to remain in effect …even for notices that ultimately fail — creating strong incentives to submit weak or legally unsupported claims simply to delay (and effectively filibuster) compliance,” wrote Tony Hackett, a policy associate for Californians Against Waste in a public comment letter to the department.

Advocates raise a second concern: the regulations allow certain waste polluting technologies — ones the law specifically excluded because they generate significant quantities of hazardous waste — to count as recycling, as long as they have a hazardous waste permit.

These technologies include chemical recycling processes that the oil industry has long promoted as a solution to plastic pollution — a claim California’s attorney general says is deliberately misleading. Rob Bonta has sued ExxonMobil alleging the company misled the public about recycling’s potential to address the plastic crisis.

“These regulations ignore explicit limits on recycling technologies and create permanent escape hatches the law never authorized,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, in a statement.

Rhonalyn Cabello, a CalRecycle spokesperson, said the agency does not comment on pending or potential litigation.

Sen. Allen agreed the regulations fall short.

“We feel that the regulations as presented don’t maintain some of the core agreements that were made in the passage of the bill,” he said. When there’s too many exclusions, he said, companies are “basically forcing everybody else to pay and getting away scot free.”

Set up to fail?

Businesses claim they want to reduce plastic waste but feel trapped by conflicting state regulations and a lack of viable packaging alternatives.

The tension starts with labeling. The state’s accurate recycling labels law, Senate Bill 343, prohibits businesses from using the chasing arrows symbol to indicate recyclability unless certain criteria are met. Advocates say the restriction is necessary to avoid confusion. But businesses say it means consumers are less likely to recycle products that could be recyclable.

“If we lose the right to use (recycling labels on) dairy cartons, our members are going to have to expand their plastic use, because that is the only other packaging type that can take a shelf stable product,” said Katie Davey, executive director of the Dairy Institute of California.

As investments from producers flow to cities and counties under the law, Cabello said, more materials may eventually meet the labeling criteria.

Beyond labeling, businesses say workable alternatives to plastic simply don’t exist yet — and that getting there will be costly. Investments needed to meet the law’s first goal alone — a 25% reduction in single-use plastic by 2032 — could cost up to $15.4 billion, according to CalRecycle estimates.

Kevin Kelly, the chief executive of Emerald Packaging, sells film plastic packaging to farmers, who use the plastic to bag items like salads and baby carrots. Paper packaging that could replicate plastic’s ability to regulate oxygen and carbon dioxide levels — keeping produce fresh — is still in early development, he said, and mass production is decades away.

“You have to build tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure to actually produce something at the level that would be needed to replace plastics,” Kelly said.

Dairy illustrates the same problem. Alternatives to plastic milk packaging include refrigerated gable-top cartons, shelf-stable cartons, and glass. Each comes with tradeoffs. Glass is heavier — meaning fewer units per shipment — and clear glass exposes fresh milk to light that can degrade it. Switching packaging lines entirely would cost producers about $40 million for a single mid-size line, according to the Dairy Institute — a cost they would pass on to consumers.

“We’re deeply concerned because we know that food costs are going to increase and products are going to come off the market because there literally is not a packaging solution within the required timeframe,” Davey said.

But USC’s Joe Árvai said producer complaints are really about the pace of change, not whether compliant packaging is possible at all.

“Whether they like it or not, these changes are coming,” he said. “In the end, there are going to be players in the industry that are going to be better able to respond, and they will be better indemnified against the shocks than their partners and competitors.”

What happens next

The next major test comes in June, when the Circular Action Alliance must submit its plan to CalRecycle outlining how producers will meet the law’s goals.

Oregon, which passed a similar law and is also facing an industry legal challenge, offers a possible model. There, grant funding is already flowing to expand reuse and refill infrastructure — helping businesses and schools replace single-use plastic products and improve recycling access.

“Despite the fact that there’s a lawsuit in Oregon, money is moving out the door,” said the Ocean Conservancy’s Anja Brandon. She said groups like hers will closely watch the June plan.

“We’ll all be waiting with bated breath” to see how producers are interpreting this and what pathways they’re laying out, she said.

Meanwhile, advocates will be watching closely as CalRecycle begins to make decisions about who qualifies for exclusions and exemptions. The Natural Resources Defense Council is waiting for CalRecycle to post additional documents before filing its lawsuit.

“If we let this thing get derailed and turned into a Swiss cheese of exemptions and non‑compliance, it will really harm our global progress on this issue,” Allen said.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.