Lawmakers ask Newsom and waste agency to follow the law on plastic legislation

California lawmakers are taking aim at proposed rules to implement a state law aimed at curbing plastic waste, saying the draft regulations proposed by CalRecycle undermine the letter and intent of the legislation.

In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and two of his top administrators, the lawmakers said CalRecycle exceeded its authority by drafting regulations that don’t abide by the terms set out by the law, Senate Bill 54.

“While we support many changes in the current draft regulations, we have identified several provisions that are inconsistent with the governing statute ... and where CalRecycle has exceeded its authority under the law,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter to Newsom, California Environmental Protection agency chief Yana Garcia, and Zoe Heller, director of the state’s Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, or CalRecycle.

The letter, which was written by Sen. Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas) and Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica), was signed by 21 other lawmakers, including Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) and Assemblymembers Al Muratsuchi (D-Rolling Hills Estates) and Monique Limón (D-Goleta).

CalRecycle submitted informal draft regulations two weeks ago that are designed to implement the law, which was authored by Allen, and signed into law by Newsom in 2022.

The lawmakers’ concerns are directed at the draft regulations’ potential approval of polluting recycling technologies — which the language of the law expressly prohibits — as well as the document’s expansive exemption for products and packaging that fall under the purview of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

The inclusion of such blanket exemptions is “not only contrary to the statute but also risks significantly increasing the program’s costs,” the lawmakers wrote. They said the new regulations allow “producers to unilaterally determine which products are subject to the law, without a requirement or process to back up such a claim.”

Daniel Villaseñor, a spokesman for the governor, said in an email that Newsom “was clear when he asked CalRecycle to restart these regulations that they should work to minimize costs for small businesses and families, and these rules are a step in the right direction ...”

At a workshop held at the agency’s headquarters in Sacramento this week, CalRecycle staff responded to similar criticisms, and underscored that these are informal draft regulations, which means they can be changed.

“I know from comments we’ve already been receiving that some of the provisions, as we have written them ... don’t quite come across in the way that we intended,” said Karen Kayfetz, chief of CalRecycle’s Product Stewardship branch, adding that she was hopeful “a robust conversation” could help highlight areas where interpretations of the regulations’ language differs from the agency’s intent.

“It was not our intent, of course, to ever go outside of the statute, and so to the extent that it may be interpreted in the language that we’ve provided, that there are provisions that extend beyond ... it’s our wish to narrow that back down,” she said.

These new draft regulations are the expedited result of the agency’s attempt to satisfy Newsom’s concerns about the law, which he said could increase costs to California households if not properly implemented.

Newsom rejected the agency’s first attempt at drafting regulations — the result of nearly three years of negotiations by scores of stakeholders, including plastic producers, package developers, agricultural interests, environmental groups, municipalities, recycling companies and waste haulers — and ordered the waste agency to start the process over.

Critics say the new draft regulations cater to industry and could result in even higher costs to both California households, which have seen large increases in their residential waste hauling fees, as well as to the state’s various jurisdictions, which are taxed with cleaning up plastic waste and debris clogging the state’s rivers, highways, beaches and parks.

The law is molded on a series of legislative efforts described as Extended Producer Responsibility laws, which are designed to shift the cost of waste removal and disposal from the state’s jurisdictions and taxpayers to the industries that produce the waste — theoretically incentivizing a circular economy, in which product and packaging producers develop materials that can be reused, recycled or composted.