California AB 793: PCR Mandate Guide for Plastic Bottles
California's recycled content mandate for plastic beverage bottles: 15, 25 and 50 percent, a twenty cent per pound shortfall penalty, and what it shows about how Europe's version will bite.
California put a recycled content mandate on plastic beverage bottles five years before the European Union did, and attached a price to missing it. For anyone following Nexam Chemical, the interest is not California itself, which is a small market for a Swedish additive supplier. It is that the American mandate is already running, with reported numbers and invoices, while the European one is still waiting for the calculation method to be written.
Assembly Bill 793 was approved by the governor on 24 September 2020 as Chapter 115 of the 2020 statutes. It added section 14547 to the Public Resources Code, which is the section to read: it has been amended since, most recently by SB 353 in 2023.
The requirement
| Period | Minimum postconsumer recycled plastic | Section |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2024 | 15% | 14547(a)(1) |
| 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2029 | 25% | 14547(a)(2) |
| On and after 1 January 2030 | 50% | 14547(a)(3) |
The percentage is an average, per beverage manufacturer, per year, across all of its plastic beverage containers subject to the state's redemption value that are sold in California. It is not per container and not per resin type. A manufacturer may run 60% in one line and nothing in another, as long as the portfolio averages out.
Two groups get more time. Wine and spirits sold in a box, bladder or pouch get two extra years at each step, under 14547(a)(4). Large containers of fruit juice and vegetable juice were not covered until 1 January 2026, under 14547(a)(5).
The penalty is a price per pound
This is the part that makes the mandate behave like a market. Under 14547(c)(1), CalRecycle calculates the shortfall in pounds, the recycled plastic the manufacturer should have used minus what it did use, and multiplies it by twenty cents. Liability began on 1 January 2023, and the first invoices went out from 1 March 2024, annually thereafter. The money goes into a Recycling Enhancement Penalty Account created by 14547(f), which may only be spent on recycling, infrastructure, collection and processing of plastic beverage containers in the state.
A manufacturer that misses can ask for the penalty to be reduced under 14547(e), by submitting a corrective action plan and pointing to anomalous market conditions or a lack of supply of recycled plastic. CalRecycle must consider it; nothing says it must agree.
Twenty cents a pound is not a fine in the usual sense. It is a ceiling on what recycled content is worth to a bottler: pay it, or buy the recycled resin, whichever is cheaper.
The target can be lowered, but not raised
Since 1 January 2025, the director of CalRecycle may review the 25% and 50% figures annually, on their own initiative or on petition from the industry, and adjust them. The adjustment is one way only: under 14547(a)(6) the director may not set the requirement above the statutory percentages. The review must weigh market conditions, recycling rates, the availability of suitable and food-grade recycled plastic, processing capacity, and manufacturers' progress.
We could not confirm whether any adjustment has been made. CalRecycle's minimum content page still states 15%, 25% and 50%, and its notices list no adjustment, but no page says in so many words that the percentages stand unchanged.
Who is covered, and who is not
The standard applies to plastic beverage containers subject to the California redemption value. Refillable containers are excluded, and so is any beverage manufacturer selling 16 million or fewer plastic beverage containers into the state in the reporting year, under 14547(i). The small-volume exemption is from the standard and the penalty only: those manufacturers still have to report every 1 March, under section 14549.3, giving virgin and postconsumer pounds by resin type, under penalty of perjury. Local governments may not set their own recycled content rules for these containers, under 14547(h).
CalRecycle publishes what manufacturers report, both individually and consolidated. The reports are raw submissions rather than a state-computed compliance rate, and the report filed in a given year covers the previous calendar year.
Why it matters to a Nexam shareholder
The mechanism California chose is worth understanding because Europe chose a different one. California prices the shortfall and lets a manufacturer decide. The European regulation sets the minimum as a condition for placing packaging on the market at all, with penalties left to member states. A price can be paid; a market access rule cannot.
Both, though, run into the same physical limit: recycled content is easy until it is not, and what breaks first is performance, not availability. That limit is what an additive supplier sells against, in PET sheet as in polyethylene film.
Sources
- AB 793 (Ting, 2020), chaptered text.
- Public Resources Code section 14547, current text including the 2023 amendments.
- CalRecycle, plastic minimum content standards and reporting for beverage manufacturers, for the published reports and the state's plain-language summary.
Independent research. Not legal advice, and not investment advice.