Recycling Nonsense: California’s Symbolic Regulations

You spin me right ’round, baby;
Right ’round like a record, baby;
Right ’round, ’round, ’round.

California, that bastion of such liberal politics that they’ve elected Gavin Newsom multiple times, is actually quite bad at real environmental regulation.

Which is not really surprising.

cf. having elected Gavin Newsom multiple times, apparently under the impression that he’d do some actual things rather than spend all his time on looking like he was doing things.

So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that California’s attempt in 2021 to improve its recycling system was literally symbolic regulation.

As in, it was literally just regulating how producers could use the recycling symbol on their packaging.

So it’s no real loss that a judge blocked that law this week.

It was a bad law in a lot of ways.

So, mostly, it got blocked because the judge said that it illegally regulates producers’ 1st Amendment rights; not because it put requirements on them, that’s legal for “commercial speech”, but because it wouldn’t actually achieve anything by that regulation.

Which is a bit on the nose.

But it’s totally true: the law attempted to restrict producers from putting the three-arrows logo on their packaging unless its materials were:

actually recyclable,
actually accepted for recycling by a majority of recyclers and
actually recycled, rather than accepted and then landfilled by the recyclers.

The judge did suggest some ways the law could have been fixed, by requiring the symbol be accompanied by information describing the actual recyclability of the materials.

He does not seem to have suggested that the law could have been fixed by making it address the problem directly.

The law could, for example, have:

created a list of actually recyclable materials,
mandated that all recycling facilities accept and process those materials,
established state-backed recyclers of last resort to deal with less economically-desirable recyclables and
forbid using any unlisted materials in commercial packaging.

Because that would be actually dealing with the problem, rather than just messing around with symbols. Which is apparently just too hard, maaaaan.

California, feh.

Oh, and interestingly, one thing that isn’t mentioned in the news coverage that I’ve seen about this decision and doesn’t seem to have been raised in court, is that California tried to impose new restrictions on using a public domain symbol that the state doesn’t own or control.

In other words, the state tried to convert a public domain symbol for the concept of recycling and turn it into a regulated certification mark for recyclability.

There’s a lot to love about this place, but its political culture is not high on that list.