March 20, 2025
Gavin Newsom delayed his own ‘nation-leading’ plastic policy. Why?
GRIST
By: Joseph Winters
Three years ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed off on the country’s strongest plastic reduction policy. The legislation, known as SB 54, gave the state recycling agency until 2025 to write rules to dramatically slash sales of single-use plastic. At the time, Newsom called the law “nation-leading,” and said he was “holding polluters responsible and cutting plastics at the source.”
California’s recycling agency, CalRecycle, has been crafting rules around the law’s implementation since 2022, negotiating the specifics with industry groups and environmental advocates and incorporating public feedback. Earlier this month, however, the governor’s office unexpectedly rejected CalRecycle’s proposed rules. He told the agency to go back to the drawing board, leaving California no closer to addressing its plastic waste management problem.
“It’s kind of like we just got slapped with a wet fish,” said Shira Lane, founder and CEO of a zero-waste organization in Sacramento called Atrium 916. Lane said she’d participated in two years of long, complicated meetings with CalRecycle officials to provide input on the regulations, and that it was unclear why the governor had now decided to reject them. His office’s statements on the issue pointed only vaguely to concerns about fairness and “minimizing costs for small businesses and working families.”
Newsom’s one-eighty arrived as plastics industry groups — many of which claim publicly to support the legislation — ramped up complaints behind closed doors about the potential impact of the law. In the absence of a clear explanation from the governor, many environmental groups suspect that he responded to industry pressure. “A lot of people were hurt,” Lane said, describing the good-faith effort they had put into shaping the rules only for them to be rejected for unclear reasons.