California’s sweeping new plastic packaging rules, finalized at the start of May, require producers to ensure that all single-use packaging and food-service ware is recyclable or compostable by 2032—the most ambitious deadline in the nation. The regulations, which implement the 2022 Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, have drawn immediate fire from both environmental groups and the plastics industry, with at least two lawsuits in the works.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians Against Waste said they plan to take the state to court, arguing that the final rules violate the law by allowing certain chemical-recycling processes to count as “recycling” despite generating significant hazardous waste. The advocates also object to a two-track system they say creates permanent escape hatches: materials with unique technical challenges can apply for time-limited exemptions, while plastics required by federal law for food safety can be excluded from the law entirely once a producer files a notice with the state—with no deadline or obligation to prove the claim.
“These regulations ignore explicit limits on recycling technologies and create permanent escape hatches the law never authorized,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste.
On the opposite flank, plastic manufacturers say the 2032 deadline is unrealistic and will drive up costs for consumers. Kevin Kelly, chief executive of Emerald Packaging, which supplies film-plastic bags for fresh vegetables, said mass production of paper-based packaging that can replicate plastic’s ability to regulate oxygen and carbon dioxide is “decades away.” Katie Davey, executive director of the Dairy Institute of California, warned that switching a single mid-size dairy packaging line to alternatives would cost about $40 million—a cost she said would be passed on to shoppers. “We’re deeply concerned because we know that food costs are going to increase and products are going to come off the market because there literally is not a packaging solution within the required timeframe,” Davey said.
The new rules were born from Senate Bill 54, a landmark 2022 law that shifted the burden of plastic waste from consumers and local governments to producers. Companies with more than $1 million in annual sales that sell products in plastic packaging must join a producer responsibility organization, the Circular Action Alliance, and pay fees to fund waste-management infrastructure and environmental mitigation. The law requires a 25 percent reduction in single-use plastic by 2032 and mandates that producers contribute $5 billion over a decade to address environmental harm in affected communities. State officials do not expect to begin distributing those funds until 2027 at the earliest.
The overhaul targets a recycling system that has long failed. In 2021, only 6 percent of plastic was recycled nationally, according to the advocacy group Beyond Plastics. In California, CalRecycle’s 2025 report found that even highly recyclable items like milk jugs and detergent bottles were recovered at just 19 percent; most other packaging types fell into single digits or below.
The path to the final rules was rocky. After an initial draft expired in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom directed regulators to rewrite the regulations, a move that environmental advocates say food and agriculture lobbyists pushed. A second draft included a broad exclusion for plastics under the jurisdiction of the FDA and USDA—covering fresh produce and supplements—that advocates said gutted the law. CalRecycle ultimately narrowed that carve-out to only plastics required by federal law for food safety, walking back the broader exemption.
Senator Ben Allen, the Democrat who authored the original law, acknowledged the compromise. “This was the product of a compromise, and it was not perfect, and everybody walked away from the table, you know, unhappy about various aspects,” Allen said. Still, he said the rules “massively move the needle on this really major problem.” Allen also expressed concern that broad exemptions could let some companies “get away scot free” while others foot the bill.
The next major milestone is June, when the Circular Action Alliance must submit its plan to CalRecycle for meeting the law’s goals. Anja Brandon, director of U.S. plastics policy for the Ocean Conservancy, said advocates will scrutinize that plan. “We’ll all be waiting with bated breath to see how producers are interpreting this and what pathways they’re laying out,” she said.
Oregon, which passed a similar law and is also facing a legal challenge from industry, offers one possible model: grant funding is already flowing there to expand reuse and refill infrastructure, Brandon noted. But in California, the immediate future will be defined by the dueling lawsuits and the June plan—both of which will test whether the state can meet its 2032 target without being “derailed and turned into a Swiss cheese of exemptions and non‑compliance,” as Allen put it.