Plastics Firms Sue State Over Recycling Fee : Lawsuit: The bottle manufacturers claim a law gives an advantage to other forms of soft-drink packaging, including aluminum cans.

Plastic bottle manufacturers--charging that California fee calculations put them at a competitive disadvantage--have sued the state, hoping to expose what they consider are inequities in a key recycling law.

The suit--filed by the Plastic Recycling Corp. of California, representing manufacturers of polyethylene terephthelate, or PET, plastic--charges that fees imposed by the state under a 1986 law, AB 2020, give an advantage to other forms of soft-drink packaging, including aluminum cans.

Each recycled material used in California beverage bottles is evaluated for its fair market value as scrap, as well as what it costs to recycle it. Recyclers profit when a material is intrinsically worth more than the recycling costs, as in the case of aluminum.

But with the lack of markets for recycled plastic, PET’s value is low. State recycling law mandates that in this case, an extra “processing” fee be paid by the plastics manufacturers to make it profitable for collectors to recycle the material.

The glass industry has agreed to pay a processing fee imposed in December. But the plastics manufacturers object to the way the state Division of Recycling computed the figures that it used to impose a processing fee to its bottles.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in Sacramento County Superior Court.

Plastics recyclers are “subsidizing the collection of all materials to the tune of 29 cents a pound,” Ron Kemalyan, executive director of the Plastics Recycling Corp., said Tuesday. “We believe the reason we have to subsidize it so heavily is because (AB) 2020 is so inefficient.”

Environmentalists say that the plastics industry is only trying to rework the formula to reduce and obscure the relatively high industry subsidies plastics makers must pay to get people to recycle their bottles, compared to aluminum and glass containers. If those costs were more evident, plastic bottles could lose market share, said Sandra E. Jerabek, executive director of Sacramento-based Californians Against Waste.

“Coke or Pepsi might begin to think, ‘Gee, now we have to pay the full cost of the environmental costs of recycling. What packaging material should we use?’ ” she said.

The new calculations in December came as a result of emergency legislation passed “to correct, in effect, a loophole,” said Pat Macht, a spokeswoman for the state Division of Recycling. “It’s a dispute over a calculation. We stand ready to defend it.”