Amid the sea of mandates, bans and fines — e.g., my local trash district recently sent us a letter noting that it will be checking bins for compliance — California officials keep forgetting the most important economic law regarding these matters: Incentives and markets offer the best hope for creating that so-called circular economy. The latest legislative fixation involves labeling. Lawmakers are upset at the way that companies account for and advertise the percentage of recycled products in various types of containers and packaging. And so the nannies are at it again.
Assembly Bill 2253 is the proposed solution. It passed the full Assembly in May and in early July passed out of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. The legislation “[r]equires that recycled content claims be based on the actual physical recycled content in a product without the use of credit-based mass balance accounting … or similar approaches that are not based on the actual physical recycled content in the product.” That’s an amazing amount of jargon to determine when a product can be deemed “recycled.”
As the bill’s author, Assembly member Tasha Boerner, D-Encinitas, explains, “Currently, companies can utilize accounting to obscure the actual recycled content of their products. This practice of greenwashing means that Californians who think they are making better choices for the environment actually aren’t.” Greenwashing refers to companies that make deceptive claims about the environmental benefits of their products. That sounds egregious, but in this case the labeling issue is complicated and benign.
Mass-balance accounting simply “measures the amount of plastic building block materials made from advanced recycling that are being mixed with traditional materials to create new products,” per America’s Plastic Makers. The trade group quotes the Rainforest Alliance: “All major international sustainability initiatives use mass balance in one form or another.” It’s not some conspiracy, but a means to promote more recycling by coming up with a reasonable way to account for recycled content given the complexities of modern manufacturing.
“Should coffee beans from a certified sustainable farm be physically separated from all other beans throughout every step of processing, storage, transportation and roasting? Should recycled aluminum from a particular collection program be physically tracked through every smelter and factory until it reaches a specific soda can?” asks Bill Shireman, who co-wrote California’s original bottle bill. He fears AB 2253 would “make recycling more expensive, make sustainable products harder to produce, increase pollution overseas, worsen the affordability crisis and slow progress toward a circular economy.”
That’s a legitimate concern that should resonate with environmentalists. The recycling industry and broader business communities are likewise sounding the alarms. An April letter to the Legislature from a coalition including the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Retailers Association and the American Chemistry Council argues that if the bill passes, “manufacturers lose the ability to track and verify recycled content through blended production processes … . The result: less recycling, higher consumer costs and a regulated community set up to fail.”
