Updated Oct. 15
Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Saturday that would have required manufacturers in California to incorporate recycled plastic into new bottles.
The measure would have mandated that plastic beverage bottles — like those used for water, soda and fruit drinks — contain a minimum of 50% recycled content by 2030, a goal that some recycling advocates said was the most ambitious in the country.
The requirements would have been phased in gradually and applied only to containers covered by the California Refund Value program, which reimburses consumers 5 to 10 cents for each aluminum, glass or plastic container brought back for recycling.
Authored by Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, Assembly Bill 792 passed both state houses by wide margins. Ting expressed disappointment at the governor’s veto.
“Setting the highest minimum recycled content standards for plastic beverage containers in the entire world would have sent signals to the recycling market that California is serious about reducing plastic waste in our environment,” Ting said in a statement.
In explaining his veto, Newsom wrote that late amendments introduced a “costly, burdensome process” to the bill.
“The waiver petitions allowed under this bill would put the burden on the state to prove to manufacturers that their products can meet recycling goals, rather than making clear that manufacturers have the responsibility to create products that can meet these goals,” Newsom wrote.
Newsom was likely referring to an amendment allowing manufacturers to appeal to an administrative judge if they fell short of the required goals, said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an environmental group that lobbied for the bill.
Murray said the provision had been added at the behest of industry lobbying group American Beverage Association and called it a “more complicated and, frankly, convoluted enforcement mechanism” that could take authority away from the state-run agency CalRecycle.
“I understand the concerns that the administration had with the bill,” Murray said. “I am absolutely confident that between the author and the administration we are going to be able to get it right next year.”
For its part, the American Beverage Association also expressed dismay at the veto.
“We’re disappointed given that this bill balanced the need for more recycled content with the realities of the marketplace to reach the goal of improving the recycling and reducing of plastic in California,” said William Dermody, a spokesman for the association.
Currently, most bottle manufacturers don’t incorporate recycled plastic into their products and instead use “virgin” plastic resin, a byproduct of fossil fuel production.
“Recycled content is competing with virgin plastics, and virgin plastics are tied very closely to the price of natural gas, which is very low right now,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. “Instead of being valuable on their own, [recycled plastics] are competing against this horribly destructive, fossil fuel-based material.”
Californians have largely embraced recycling: The most common plastic beverage bottles, which are made of #1 plastic — also known as PET or polyethylene terephthalate — were recycled at a rate of 74% in 2018. That’s 9.2 billion plastic bottles that made their way back to recycling centers last year alone.
The dirty secret that has increasingly gained attention, however, is that a lot of what people were putting into their curbside blue bins or taking back to recycling centers wasn’t actually getting reused. Much of it was shipped to China, until the country stopped accepting imports of the rest of the world’s plastic waste.
