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Source Reduction Requirements for Plastic Packaging and Food Service Ware

Writer's picture: Emma Roos-CollinsEmma Roos-Collins

Updated: Jan 27


California’s Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Responsibility Act (“SB 54” or “the Act”) is unique in the growing extended producer responsibility (“EPR”) packaging landscape for its source reduction component for packaging plastic covered materials. Minnesota’s EPR program, adopted in June 2024, also has a source/waste reduction feature but the compliance targets will be developed after the needs assessment is conducted, meaning California is the only state with specific source reduction targets already in place.


Source reduction is the reduction in the amount of covered material created by a producer relative to a baseline through methods including concentration, right-sizing, lightweighting, eliminating plastic components, and shifting to reusable or refillable packaging.

By January 1, 2032, a producer responsibility organization (“PRO”) acting on behalf of participants of the PRO's approved plan shall develop and implement a plan to achieve the 25-percent reduction by weight and 25 percent by plastic component source reduction requirement for covered material sold, offered for sale, or distributed in the state. The PRO must establish “enforceable agreements” with each of its approved plan participants to implement this section.  


It is unclear how the PRO for California’s program, Circular Action Alliance (“CAA”), proposes to meet these requirements or how it will pass those obligations on to producers.  According to CAA, it is working on a framework but no decisions have yet been made. One option raised by CAA in a regulatory workshop is to create incentives by imposition of eco-modulated fees to encourage source reduction or penalize failure to source reduce.


On December 31, 2024, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (commonly referred to as “CalRecycle”) published the Source Reduction Baseline Report – the amount of plastic covered material that was sold, offered for sale, or distributed in the state in the 2023 calendar year – giving producers two years before the first source reduction requirement deadline. As 2023 was still affected by the COVID-era e-commerce boom and its corresponding increase in plastic packaging, producers may find that meeting the reductions goals are less onerous than at first glance.


However source reduction targets are met, the Act requires producers to prepare individual source reduction plans that thoroughly categorized their past, current, and projected use of plastic covered materials. SB 54 requires producers to report any amount of covered material, by number of plastic components and weight of covered material, the producer source reduced since January 1, 2013, as well as estimating the same through 2032.


While SB 54 does not provide a specific deadline in the statute for submission of an individual source reduction plan to the PRO, CAA’s first annual PRO plan is due to CalRecycle by January 1, 2027. CAA’s annual plan must include summaries of information from individual source reduction plans, so producers can expect to be required to provide individual source reductions plans to CAA by mid- to late-2026.


By 2032, the PRO must source reduce at least 10% of plastic covered material by shifting to refillable or reusable materials or through eliminating a plastic component. The remaining 15% of source reduction may occur by (a) concentration, (b) rightsizing, (c) lightweighting, (d) shifting to bulk or large format packaging that allows consumers to refill home or commercial reusable containers, or (e) shifting from a plastic covered material to a nonplastic covered material.


No more than 8% of the source reduced plastic covered materials may be met through shifting to postconsumer recycled (“PCR”) content. SB 54 requires that the PCR content must be validated by a third party and may not contain intentionally added perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (commonly shorthanded as “PFAS”).


CAA can be expected to provide guidance to registered producers, but many of the source reduction requirements will require internal data collection. Producers should prepare for committing significant resources into documenting their post-2012 use of covered materials subject to the source reduction requirements.



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