Three environmental organizations have filed suit against CalRecycle over the finalized regulations implementing California’s SB 54 single-use packaging law, arguing the rules create unlawful loopholes that gut the legislation’s core mandates.
Oceana, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Californians Against Waste Foundation (CAW) filed the lawsuit on June 2 in San Francisco Superior Court.
The groups allege that CalRecycle’s final regulations for its extended producer responsibility (EPR) program for packaging, which were approved last month, add exclusions for large categories of plastic packaging, allow producers to claim indefinite exemptions and fail to guard against harmful technologies that the law was designed to restrict.
“While SB 54 remains a monumental achievement as the nation’s strongest single-use plastic reduction law, some of the final regulations implementing the statute undermine the law’s ambitions,” said Christy Leavitt, Oceana’s senior campaign director, in a statement. “We are taking this action to ensure that the state continues to recognize the urgency of the plastic pollution crisis, acts according to the statute, and protects California’s coast and communities.”
Nick Lapis, CAW director of advocacy, described the regulations as allowing loopholes that protect the status quo for plastic packaging producers going further, he argued, than CalRecycle’s earlier draft rules.
“These regulations ignore explicit limits on recycling technologies and create permanent escape hatches the law never authorized,” he said in a statement. “CalRecycle’s original draft regulations were already not strong enough to ensure the systemic change that the public expected from this law, but the agency’s final regulations added even more loopholes to protect the status quo for producers of plastic packaging.”
The lawsuit was not unexpected.
Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the National Stewardship Action Council (NSAC), told Resource Recycling ahead of the original approval that litigation is a predictable outcome of a rulemaking of this scale. She urged stakeholders not to let legal challenges slow implementation.
“If you want to challenge something in court, go ahead,” Sanborn previously told Resource Recycling. “Let’s keep moving. Don’t take the pedal off the metal on actual implementation.”
SB 54 requires reductions in single-use plastic packaging and foodware, mandates producer investment in reuse and refill systems and requires all covered packaging to be recyclable or compostable. The state’s economic analysis projects the law will save California consumers, businesses and local governments more than $30 billion over the next decade.
