Update: On June 30th, California passed the most sweeping EPR reform in the U.S. to date.

The decision was initially supposed to be made with a state-wide ballot vote later in the year, but state legislators took matters into their own hands and gave near-unanimous support to plastics bill SB 54. The new bill achieves even more than we hoped the ballot voting initiative could, particularly around funding for the environmental justice community, and will: 1. Allocate $5 billion over the next 10 years to protect California’s lands and waters from plastics; 2. Ban chemical recycling, a harmful process that burns plastic to use as fuel; 3. Phase out single-use packaging, and; 4. Make producers fund efforts to reduce plastic production, and increase the collection and processing of recyclable plastic items

We are so grateful for your support and the incredible leadership of The Nature Conservancy, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Oceana, the Ocean Conservancy, CalPIRG, and California Environmental Voters in this effort. 

Every year, seven trillion pieces of microplastic flow into San Francisco Bay. 

Plastic pollution is wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems along the coast and in communities across California, endangering the health of people and animals. In one example, plastic debris has been found in 25 percent of California's fish, causing injury and death and carrying across the food web, eventually to humans. A recent study found people consume as much as 5 grams of plastic per week, the equivalent of a credit card's worth of toxic material cycling through our bodies.

Companies are creating crushing amounts of plastic pollution, and Californians are forced to bear the costs. But a new ballot initiative could change that and hold manufacturers–not taxpayers–accountable for the pollution they produce.

Californians have an opportunity to stem this wave of waste in a ballot initiative this November. The Plastics Free California Initiative will introduce extended producer responsibility (EPR) measures that make plastics producers shoulder the costs of recycling and waste management for the products they produce. 

California’s EPR would change recycling in three ways:

1. Establish a plastic pollution fee on all single-use plastic packaging and foodware produced 

2. Require producers to reduce single-use plastic packaging and single-use plastic foodware sold in or into California to the maximum extent possible, and by no less than 25 percent by 2030

3. Require producers to use recycled content and renewable materials

By shifting the cost of recycling from the consumer to the producer, the EPR measures will strike plastics production and pollution at its source. Producers will be incentivized to create sustainable packaging and disincentivized to continue perpetuating the single-use, disposable culture that has put the health of California’s residents and environment at risk. 

Join thousands of Californians in pledging to support this critical ballot initiative to create a future free of plastics. We'll keep you up-to-date as the ballot measure progresses.