The question used to be whether brands would commit to recycled polypropylene at scale. Now, according to the world’s largest plastic-to-plastic polypropylene recycler, the question is when.
PureCycle has spent the past several years proving its dissolution-based recycling process could produce food-grade polypropylene from post-consumer curbside waste, and the technical successes are starting to translate into commercial momentum.
The timing couldn’t be more pointed. California’s permanent SB 54 regulations were approved May 1, producer registration closed as of June 1, and within days of approval, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Californians Against Waste (CAW) announced plans to sue CalRecycle over what they called unlawful exemptions and the improper recognition of certain technologies as recycling. The fight over what counts is now being hashed out.
The company has qualified its resin across a range of packaging formats, including butter tubs, cream cheese containers, quick-service restaurant dipping cups, food trays, take-out containers and cake icing packaging. That list now includes film.
“I don’t think anybody in the world can take post-consumer curbside waste and turn it into film,” said Dustin Olsen, PureCycle CEO, in a recent conversation with Resource Recycling. “It’s just hard to do, but we’ve done it successfully.”
That achievement, Olsen said, changed the conversation with brands. Technical credibility at scale generates inbound interest in a way that pilot projects don’t.
“We are qualified across a lot of different types of products,” he said. “We’re proving to the brands that it’s a solution that they can count on.”
That confidence has been accelerated by state-level EPR policy and especially by New Jersey’s recent decision to qualify PureCycle’s resin toward its minimum recycled content requirement.
“We had a lot of brands coming to us and saying, ‘Let’s go, finally we have it,'” Olsen said. “It gives clarity for the entire nation — helps California, helps New Jersey, helps the brands, and they’re coming out of the woodwork right now, asking us to help them find a solution for next year.”
SB 54’s full EPR program is scheduled to begin January 1, 2027, so brands are seeking qualified PCR supply for that launch window.
The infrastructure problem
EPR’s role, from PureCycle’s vantage point, is less about mandating behavior and more about solving a foundational market problem: recyclers can’t build infrastructure without demand signals, and brands can’t commit to recycled content supply that doesn’t exist yet.
“You’ve got to build the infrastructure to do the recycling, you’ve got to have the mandate for the recycling to build the infrastructure,” Olsen said. “I think EPR tries to solve that.”
The combination of EPR funding mechanisms paired with recycled content mandates, the model California and New Jersey have pursued, is the more durable framework, he said. One creates the supply pipeline; the other creates the demand pull.
Film is a particular pressure point. Flexible packaging has historically been among the hardest materials to route back into a circular supply chain, and the ability to produce film from curbside-collected PP gives brands a pathway that previously didn’t exist at commercial scale, one that now carries direct SB 54 compliance value.
Plastic-to-plastic as the preferred direction
The SB 54 litigation is trying to define a question Olsen has been helping legislators answer for years: what technologies should count as recycling?
The NRDC and Californians Against Waste suits argue CalRecycle’s finalized regulations improperly allow technologies that produce hazardous waste or convert plastic into fuel to qualify toward recycling targets. It’s the same fault line Olsen described when discussing how states are drawing the line between plastic-to-plastic solutions and plastic-to-fuel approaches.
PureCycle has engaged with lawmakers across roughly half of U.S. states on that question and says most are gravitating toward plastic-to-plastic over plastic-to-fuel.
The distinction has real policy consequences. Plastic-to-fuel processes convert plastic into gasoline, diesel or kerosene. Plastic-to-plastic recycling keeps the material in the value chain, and in the case of film, returns a difficult format back to its original use.
“The plastic-to-plastic solution that we’re offering is very different,” Olsen said, naming California, New Jersey, Colorado, Washington and Oregon as states moving in that direction.
Bins of bipartisan support
Recycling hasn’t had trouble finding friends across the legislative spectrum, and Olsen says that’s by design.
“Recycling is a kind of violently successful bipartisan movement,” he said. Florida, he noted, has seen recycling measures draw unanimous support from both parties. “No one wants to see plastic in the ocean. No one wants plastic in their food.”
As SB 54 heads toward litigation and other environmental policies face political headwinds, the broad-based support behind recycling legislation gives plastic-to-plastic EPR frameworks a durability that other sustainability mandates haven’t been able to successfully sustain or scale.
With brands now registered under SB 54 and courts preparing to weigh in on what recycling actually means under law, brands are registered, courts are watching and the definition of recycling is finally gaining more clarity.
