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While a federal judge blocked California from enforcing Senate Bill (S.B.) 343 this summer, granting a preliminary injunction to a coalition of 21 organizations challenging what they believe are restrictions on truthful recycling labels and information, panelists during the Oct. 29 Paper and Plastics Recycling Conference session SB 343: National Implications of California's Truth in Labeling Law advised affected parties to comply with the law rather than wait to see what transpires in court.

“The attorneys, who are friends of mine, that brought the lawsuit that led to the injunction brought it as a labeling challenge,” said session moderator Christopher Smith with the law firm Saul Ewing LLP, headquartered in Philadelphia. “They brought it as a First Amendment challenge, saying that California is violating the dormant commerce clause by de facto regulating the entire country through its own laws.”

He added that some consumer packaged goods companies “see the injunction and they think it's over. … I always counsel them, ‘You can think that, but you're wrong.’”

S.B. 343, also known as the “Truth in Labeling” law, was passed in 2021 to address concerns that recyclability claims were misleading consumers about whether products are recycled in practice. The law seeks to align package labeling with California’s recycling system by tying recyclability claims to verifiable collection, sorting and processing outcomes rather than to what is recyclable in theory.

The law requires products and packaging to meet specific design and composition requirements and collection and processing thresholds, such as being collected by recycling programs that encompass at least 60 percent of California's population being “sorted into defined streams for recycling processes” by at least 60 percent of recycling programs in the state.

Related laws

The law is related to S.B. 54, California’s extended producer responsibility (EPR) law, according to Lynn Dyer, president of Ameripen, headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts. While the requirement that S.B. 343 establishes for 60 percent of California residents to have access to recycling for a product or package before it can be labeled recyclable is consistent with standards established by the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, California went further, she said. “Not only does it have to be accepted by 60 percent of the population in California, but you need to make sure that there are enough recycling facilities … actually processing it.”

End markets also must be available for the collected material, Dyer said, to meet the recyclability standard under S.B. 343.

In addition to funding recycling, she added that S.B. 54 is designed to ensure that packaging being used in California is recyclable, compostable or reusable. “The tie there is that discussion of what's recyclable or not, and those discussions of if it's recyclable or not [are] going to impact the EPR fees that are going to be assessed on the producers because of their recyclability of that specific product.”

Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, headquartered in Union City, California, said the two laws have become conflated, with S.B. 54 getting most of the attention.

“I don't have any customer who's calling about 343 anymore,” he said. “Now, they're all calling about 54, and we're telling them to go to an attorney.”

While Emerald Packaging’s customers appear to understand 343 and have been removing the recycling symbol from their packaging, Kelly said, “The hard part is what 343 set the table for, which is 54.”

Widespread ramifications

Jordan Fengel, president of the Carton Council, Falls Church, Virginia, said removing the recycling symbol from packaging to avoid potential S.B. 343 violations could have widespread ramifications, however. “No one makes a California-specific package, so you remove that logo, [and] now we have a national consumer set that goes, ‘Oh, there's no more logo on this.’ And so all of the work that we've done outside of California now is also impacted.”

He added that while cartons have been added to the CMC, or covered materials categories, list in California, brands and large consumer packaged goods companies have decided to remove the recyclable logo from their carton packaging as a legal protection, causing confusion for residents of California as well as those in other U.S. states.

“We know that labels are oftentimes the last place that the public looks to make a determination in terms of what is accepted for recycling wherever they are, and we all know that that varies place by place,” said Heath Nettles, executive director of the California-based National Stewardship Action Council. “I spent two decades in marketing and communications, and I am always fond of saying … if you can't operationalize it, don't market it. … Recycling is not collection. Collection is not recycling. It's not recycled until it's made into something new. If you can't ensure that it's made into something new, then yes, it'd be better to not have any sort of claim … that is going to confuse the public, lead to it going into the wrong bin and then ultimately drive up costs for the system.”

Fengel said unclear or changing legislative requirements create real costs and trade-offs for businesses.

“A lot of brands are integrating into having their own filling equipment. Filling equipment's not cheap, so you're spending sometimes tens to hundreds of millions of dollars setting up these equipment lines.”

When a law mistakenly labels packaging as unrecyclable, he said, it could make that investment obsolete or push a brand into a package that could be detrimental to recycling, making a company's fees higher under S.B. 54.

“There's not a silver bullet package,” Fengel added. “That's important to know.”

Engaging in the process

Nettles called for companies to engage in the legislative process. “You're either at the table, or you're on the menu," he said. "I think it's important to have spaces where these challenges from implementation to negotiation and things of that nature can be voiced at the table because I don't think anyone enters into a space to negotiate any of these laws thinking that we want to drive up system cost or we don't want to address affordability and things of that nature. I think various parties are coming at this in good faith with various interests.”

Federal legislation

The panelists mentioned the PACK, or Packaging and Claims Knowledge, Act, a federal bill introduced to the House this fall and supported by Ameripen, with Dyer saying a national standard could reduce conflicting state-level labeling rules, but accuracy matters as much as consistency.

“Consistency without accuracy isn't something that's going to restore public confidence in recycling. It's not something that's going to lead to more affordable systems, and it's not something that is going to reduce contamination,” she said. “So, as long as there's consistency and accuracy going hand in hand, that's what I think is most important.”

Dyer added that some opponents of the PACK Act fear it will lead to greenwashing. “And the reality is we are trying to avoid that, so one of the things that we added into the PACK Act is a requirement for third-party certification on a product, whether it's recyclable, compostable or reusable,” she said. While “industry doesn't love to be told you have to pay a third party for some sort of certification,” Dyer continued, certification by an ISO-certified independent third party that ensures access, sorting and end markets are available adds “another layer so that the consumer can ultimately trust the label that is on that product.”

While Ameripen supports federal recyclability labeling legislation, Dyer said the organization doesn’t support federal EPR law yet. “We're not advocating for a national law on EPR because we still don't know what works and what doesn't,” she said. “We don't want a national law built on something that's not actually going to achieve what it set out to achieve.”

Regarding S.B. 343, Nettles said he believed the law would withstand legal scrutiny, adding, “I think there may be some aspects of it that may be shaved around the edges.”

He continued, “I would advocate for producers [and] for packaging companies, at this point, not to think you're going to get by with this by just ignoring it and pretend[ing] it's not going to happen.”

Source

- Recycling Today (2026-11-04) - Original article: PPRC 2026: Getting to the truth in recyclablity labeling - https://www.recyclingtoday.com/2026-pprc-getting-to-the-truth-in-recyclability-labeling