For the brands Sara Lowe works with, SB 54 has stopped being a future problem.
As senior executive administrator at Bay Cities Packaging & Design, a California-based packaging manufacturer and designer, Lowe has spent the past several months taking calls from clients who let California’s packaging EPR law unravel while more urgent priorities took over, until compliance deadlines made that impossible.
“You deal with the fire, the thing that’s on fire today,” she told Resource Recycling. “EPR, because it was in the future, wasn’t the thing on fire. It is now.”
The deadline to submit 2023 baseline data to the Circular Action Alliance has already passed. Lowe estimates about half of Bay Cities’ clients made it. The other half are catching up now, and not always with the right people in the room.
“We’re really seeing the struggle is with our kind of mid-market and smaller clients who were maybe under the thresholds in Oregon and Colorado, but have just realized that they are definitely in scope for California,” she said. “There’s been a bit of a scramble.”
A data problem
For many brands, the first obstacle isn’t fees or redesign. It’s basic supply chain visibility.
Lowe described a client that produces plastic blister clamshells, a common retail packaging format, that came to Bay Cities knowing it had a problem but without the information needed to act on it.
“They knew it was plastic, and they knew that was going to be a problem, but they didn’t know what type… what kind of resin that was, and how it was going to be priced, or even what quick changes they could make to reduce those fees,” she said.
The issue compounds at the SKU level, Lowe indicated. Under SB 54’s covered materials framework, plastics alone carry up to 90 material classifications. A single package with four components generates four separate line items, each requiring weight, material classification and recycled content data.
“The number of data points can get very, very overwhelming,” Lowe said. “I think that’s actually what led to a lot of the delays.”
Larger national and multinational brands have largely navigated this with the ability to build out compliance teams and regulatory affairs offices for exactly this kind of work. The burden falls on smaller and mid-market producers that don’t have that organizational infrastructure.
Too much, too fast
Lowe was at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s SPC Impact conference in Nashville in April, and the theme she kept hearing echoed what she’s seen with her own clients: California’s program launched with too much complexity at once.
“California really wanted to do everything all at once,” she said. “It wasn’t just consumer packaging. It includes B2B packaging, there’s the 25% source reduction mandate, there’s the $5 billion fund. The amount of complexity of this program at launch has been troublesome for people who really want to comply and participate.”
SB 54’s final regulations, approved earlier this year after years of stakeholder process, gave waiting brands the certainty they needed to get started. But the scope of what they were starting proved daunting.
“Because California was coming in with these three big pillars, and every pillar has components underneath it that brand folks need to comply with, the complexity of that was just overwhelming,” Lowe said. “Folks just backed off until they had some sense of for sure what was going to be required.”
Her recommendation for states still developing packaging EPR frameworks is to start simpler and build in phases. New York’s Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (SB 1464A / A1749), which faces a June 10 deadline as the legislature prepares to adjourn, is among the bills now in motion.
“Really starting simpler, and putting some frameworks around when you’re going to get to some of those more ambitious goals, I think would be a big help to people,” she said.
On the revenue threshold question, Lowe offered a specific structural fix: phase brands in by size.
“I might have phased brands in at different revenues. Start with the multinationals, have them get started, and then over a number of years bring that revenue threshold down,” she said. “I think a lot of people who thought their company was going to be too small to be in this first wave are the folks who are really going to struggle.”
Selling $1 million worth of product in California is not a high bar given the size of the state’s economy, she noted, and many smaller brands never saw the threshold coming.
The eye of the hurricane
Despite the implementation rollercoaster, Lowe isn’t pessimistic about where SB 54 lands.
“We are in the eye of the hurricane,” she said. “But on the other side, if this works as intended, we’re going to have a much more robust recycling infrastructure.”
Consumer trust in recycling, which has been eroded in part by years of contamination problems and the collapse of export markets, is a recoverable loss, she argued, if the program generates the kind of verifiable data it’s designed to produce.
“Consumers don’t trust that when they put something in their recycle bin that it’s being recycled,” Lowe said. “If we can point to data around what gets picked up, what gets recycled, you’re going to see brands moving into more recyclable packaging, with better messaging on that packaging.”
The mandate that packaging achieve 65% recycling rates in California creates an accountability loop, one that only works if consumers participate, which only happens if they understand what’s recyclable and believe the system works, Lowe said.
“I think all this is the right lever to pull,” she said. “It’s just messy right now, because we’re all figuring it out as we go.”
