SACRAMENTO, California — Environmental groups on Wednesday announced that they plan to sue the Newsom administration after it weakened landmark plastic recycling rules.
What happened: The Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians Against Waste announced their intent to sue a few days after the Newsom administration finalized rules requiring manufacturers to pay to recycle and reduce single-use plastic packaging to implement a landmark 2022 law, SB 54.
The groups, which helped negotiate the 2022 law in the Legislature as part of a deal with plastic manufacturers to avoid a fight at the ballot box, are planning to argue in court that the final rules violate the original intent of the law by exempting certain types of packaging, and by opening the door to advanced recycling technologies that are harmful to the environment.
“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, in a press release. “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.”
