Recycling symbol cannot appear on non-recyclable items, according to California bill

The recycling symbol – those three arrows stamped on a myriad of plastic items – doesn’t mean what most people think, and a California bill wants to change that.

The California legislature yesterday passed a bill prohibiting businesses from affixing the recycling symbol to items that are not regularly recycled statewide. The bill now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature, and if enacted, it would end a labeling practice that has confused consumers for decades and created major headaches for the waste industry. solid.

Originally, the ubiquitous “arrow hunt” symbol was not meant to appear on all plastics. Rather, it was designed by a student for a competition in the early 1970s to symbolize paper recycling. The company that sponsored the competition released the symbol in the public domain. Confusion around chasing arrows began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when oil and plastics companies pressured states to have resin identification codes, which included the arrows, be mandatory on all plastic, even if it could not be easily recycled.

While all plastics can technically be recycled, only a small percentage actually is. In the United States, only about 9% of all plastics are recycled each year, and about 9% of all plastics ever produced have been recycled. The rest are incinerated or, more likely, landfilled or scattered as rubbish.

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Although many plastics pose problems for recycling companies, plastic bags are particularly pernicious. Although most curbside recycling programs do not accept plastic bags, people still throw them in the trash, thinking they are recyclable because they are labeled with the chasing arrows symbol.

It was this confusion that led California State Senator Ben Allen to propose the bill that is now on the governor’s desk. After collecting his newspaper every morning, Allen threw the plastic bag into his recycling bin. “I thought, oh, it’s recyclable, but I actually made it worse by trying to do the right thing,” Allen told CalMatters.

Allen’s proposal, known as Senate Bill 343, would require CalRecycle, the state’s recycling agency, to collect data on the types of plastic most commonly recycled in the state. Only those that are recycled at a rate of 75 percent and do not contain certain compounds like PFAS would be allowed to retain the chasing arrows symbol. All others would be stamped with a solid triangle around the resin identification code.

In practice, this means that class 1 or 2 plastics – PETE and HDPE – would most likely be marked with the chasing arrows symbol. Everyone else would get the solid triangle. If the recycling of those other plastics take off, they could get their arrows back. Currently, however, only a handful of California municipalities accept anything other than # 1 and # 2 for curbside recycling.

The plastics and packaging industries have voiced opposition to the bill, saying it will create a patchwork of regulations across the country and lead more waste to landfills.

The California bill is the latest attempt to overhaul struggling recycling systems since China stopped importing recycled plastics. Maine and Oregon both recently passed laws that levy a fee on packaging producers based largely on the amount of plastic they produce.

Origins of the industry

Plastic recycling was originally advocated by oil and gas companies as a solution to growing concerns about plastic waste in the 1970s and 1980s. An investigation by NPR and PBS’s Frontline revealed a decades-long campaign to convince the public that recycling would solve the sustainability problems of plastic. “The feeling was that the plastics industry was under fire from criticism – we had to do what it takes to calm things down because we want to keep making plastic products,” said Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, at NPR.

For years, the plan seemed to work. Recycling programs have spread across the country and plastic production has skyrocketed, with more than 300 million tonnes manufactured each year.

However, in recent years, the tide has started to turn again. Plastic pollution fills the oceans and consumers are increasingly concerned about the ubiquity of microplastics in the environment. As scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated ways to detect microplastics, they have been found in an alarming range of places, from mountain tops to fish nurseries, and even in people’s droppings.

This new bill is unlikely to slow the exponential growth of plastic, but it could clear up some of the confusion and lead to a more streamlined recycling process. “Americans find recycling… more confusing than building IKEA furniture, doing their taxes, playing the stock market, or understanding their spouse,” Allen told CalMatters.