As plastic law goes into effect, industry sets the numbers

California is letting the plastics industry decide how much plastic to cut under the state’s landmark single-use plastic law — and preliminary numbers suggest it’s less than half what the state estimated in a 2024 report.

Under Senate Bill 54, the 2022 law requiring all single-use packaging and foodware sold in California be recyclable or compostable by 2032, industry must cut single-use plastic materials by 25%. That begins with a 10% reduction by Jan. 1, and a 20% cut by 2030.

The cuts will be based on how much plastic was sold and distributed in the state in 2023. That’s the baseline.

On Nov. 1, CalRecycle will replace its own estimate of that baseline — 2.9 million tons — with a figure supplied by the Circular Action Alliance, which represents the state’s plastic producers, packagers and retailers under the single-use plastic law. In June, the industry put the 2023 total at 1.29 million tons — 44% of the state estimate.

Zoe Heller, the director of CalRecycle, said in a statement that new numbers have been submitted by the alliance, and CalRecycle is reviewing them. She did not provide the new numbers. Nor did the Circular Action Alliance.

CalRecycle spokeswoman Melanie Turner said the adoption of the industry’s numbers makes sense “because the updated baseline will rely on actual data rather than modeling.”

The state’s number came from Accenture — a global company that provides businesses and governments with consulting and technological services. CalRecycle contracted with Accenture to come up with a 2023 baseline. Using both publicly available and confidential data, Accenture developed models estimating Californians used 2.9 million tons of plastic, or roughly 171.4 billion plastic components in 2023.

The Circular Action Alliance came up with its baseline using data submitted by its member companies.

The alliance is the representative body that writes the industry plan for meeting the law’s targets, reports producers’ data to the state and sets member recycling and reduction fees. It is part of the law’s construction, which relies on plastic producers and distributors to take financial responsibility for the plastic it brings into the state, relieving taxpayers, cities and other municipalities of that burden.

Asked if the discrepancy between the two estimates was surprising or concerning, Turner said it was not unexpected. The law required the state to come up with its own estimate by 2025 and then “allow the baseline to be updated once producer data is available.”

Larine Urbina, a spokeswoman for the alliance, said the two estimates were developed for different purposes. She said the government’s report was an estimate and made before any producer had begun reporting under the requirements of the law.

To some observers, however, the discrepancy is worrisome.

The number is “indisputably hard to estimate,” said Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at UC Santa Barbara and director of the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. Yet “it is important to know where the starting line is on this journey,” he said.

McCauley and a group of researchers have been investigating the single-use plastic law as it goes into effect because it could substantially reduce ocean plastic off the California coast.

Illustrating the significance of the baseline number, he noted that if his New Year’s resolution were to slim down by 10%, and one scale said he weighed 350 pounds while another said 150, that would be the difference between losing 35 pounds or 15.

McCauley and his team did their own analysis. They compared five estimates of the 2023 baseline, made with three methods: landfill audits, economic models and producer reporting. The industry’s figure came in lowest, about 30% below the group’s median of 3 million tons, even after the team adjusted the industry number upward, accounting for small producers who are exempt from the law and companies that may be under-reporting or not reporting at all.

To Turner’s point about actual data, two state landfill audits, in which crews sorted and weighed real trash, put Californians’ 2023 single-use plastic use at about 3 million tons. That’s in line with the state’s original estimate, not the industry’s preliminary one.

If the state adopts a producer’s baseline close to 1.29 million tons, McCauley said, it also will inflate recycling numbers.

Take High Density Polyethylene, or HDPE, used to make shampoo and detergent bottles. According a state report this year, the recycling rate for that plastic is 19% — a number that came from the state’s analysis of all the recyclable material thrown into the trash. State officials divided the amount of HDPE that actually was recycled — roughly 19,000 tons of HDPE — and divided that by the total amount of HDPE that went into the waste stream, about 100,000 tons.

But if you were to use the producer’s numbers, the total HDPE waste would be about only 44,000 tons, and the recycling percentage would jump to 44% — without any more HDPE getting recycled.

McCauley said it is critical that California get the numbers right. Not only will it determine how much plastic we keep out of the oceans and environment, but it also will guide other states looking to California to enact their own plastic laws.

Judith Enck, former regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and president of Beyond Plastics, said “the industry-generated numbers are highly suspect.”

“We would not accept data from the tobacco industry on smoking rates and it would be unwise to rely on packaging industry data on their own use of plastics,” she said.

In other plastic news

An investigation by The Times showed that industry has been aware microplastics could migrate throughout the human body after ingestion for at least a half-century. In documents obtained from university archives, executives discussed a study showing PVC particles could travel from the gut into the blood and brain and breast milk and found that they could cross the placenta. The documents show they also were concerned, with one executive saying the study was being cited as a “horror story.”

Meanwhile, researchers at Columbia University discovered that when microplastics and water mix, a third class of molecules, known as reactive oxygen species, is created. These molecules are a kind of free radical, a broad term for a class of unstable, high-energy molecules. They are known to damage cells and promote inflammation. As one of the researchers described it to my colleague Corinne Purtill, they “tend to damage nearby materials and molecules,” potentially causing mutations in DNA.

In El Niño news

The combination of a full moon, a Kelvin wave and El Niño is hitting coastal communities hard. According to Times reporters, seawater from Newport Harbor surged over seawalls and flowed onto city streets, inundating homes and businesses this week.

The marine heat wave gripping the coast has caused seawater levels to rise 1.25 to 1.8 feet higher than they would be just from the movement of the moon, Earth and sun. On Tuesday, the high tide in Newport Beach, which was predicted to be 6.7 feet, rose to 8.4 feet, the highest the city has seen.

Other coastal cities are seeing similar seawater inundation, including San Pedro, Redondo Beach and Huntington Beach. And scientists say its only going to get worse as the winter goes on.

And finally, California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment was released this month. It says Southern California could lose 30% to 70% of its beaches over the next several decades. As my colleague Blanca Begert noted, as ocean levels rise, waves crash farther inland and the coast continues to crumble, by 2100, almost half of all beach cliffs are likely to retreat by 30 to 80 feet.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

On the Boiling Point Podcast this week, hear reporter Hayley Smith and host Miranda Green discuss instance where AI has been used to generate letter to air pollution regulators.