Environmental Advocates to Challenge Plastics Regulations in Court

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (May 6, 2026) – CalRecycle, the state agency charged with protecting public health and the environment by reducing plastic pollution and increasing recycling, finalized weakened regulations for the state’s landmark packaging law, creating giant loopholes that undermine the law’s recycling and plastic reduction goals. Environmental groups plan to challenge the regulations.

SB 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, which was signed into law in 2022, established California as the first state in the country to mandate comprehensive Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging.

The law shifts the burden of packaging waste management to the producers who create and sell packaged products. Importantly, it sets targets for reducing plastic packaging overall while increasing recycling of plastic packaging. The finalized regulations undermine both these goals by unlawfully exempting certain plastic packaging from the reduction and recycling requirements and by counting as recycling polluting technologies that should not count as recycling under the law.

“These new rules create huge loopholes for plastic packaging that violate the law,” said Avinash Kar, senior director of the toxics program at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).“We expect to challenge this in court.”

SB 54 excludes certain polluting technologies from counting as recycling—for example, when a technology generates significant quantities of hazardous waste. The revised regulations disregard that limit and allow these polluting technologies to count as recycling as long as they have a permit, no matter how much hazardous waste they produce. SB 54 also applies to virtually all plastic packaging in California unless federal law overrides California law. The revised regulations do an end run around SB 54 and allow covered products to escape regulation.

“These regulations ignore explicit limits on recycling technologies and create permanent escape hatches the law never authorized,” said Nick Lapis, Director of Advocacy at Californians Against Waste. “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.”

NRDC and Californians against Waste have been advocating for CalRecycle to adopt regulations consistent with SB 54 that impose strict plastic reduction and recycling requirements for plastic packaging and ensure that polluting technologies do not get counted as recycling, as the law requires.

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 3 million members and online activists. Established in 1970, NRDC uses science, policy, law and people power to confront the climate crisis, protect public health and safeguard nature. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Beijing and Delhi (an office of NRDC India Pvt. Ltd).