California bill promotes dual-stream recycling

On Friday, Aug. 30, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an assembly bill into law that encourages local governments to increase curbside separation in their recycling programs. 

AB 815 was authored by Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters, California, in order to reduce contamination in the state’s recycling stream. The bill states that the measure would “incentivize, but not require communities and waste haulers to implement [dual-stream] recycling programs.”

According to the bill, existing law requires cities, counties or regional agencies to submit an annual report to the state’s Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) summarizing its progress in reducing solid and household hazardous waste. Existing law requires the department to review a jurisdiction’s compliance with the diversion requirements every two to four years and requires the department to issue an order of compliance if the department finds, after considering specified factors, the jurisdiction failed to make a good faith effort to implement its source reduction and recycling element or household hazardous waste element. The bill states that “after issuing an order of compliance, existing law authorizes the department to impose administrative civil penalties upon that jurisdiction, as provided.”

The bill will require California’s Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery to consider whether jurisdictions have implemented a dual-stream recycling element or household hazardous waste element. 

AB 815 had bipartisan support throughout the legislative process, and the measure will take effect on Jan. 1, 2020. 

The California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) reports that the bill has good intentions, but it seems to lack impact.

“Recent turmoil in global recycling markets have lead many government agencies to take a hard look at how they handle recycling, and the state of California is no exception," CRRA reports in a statement. "In recent years, easy access to markets for mixed recyclables has spurred the widespread adoption of single-stream recycling, which is more efficient for collectors and processors and easy for residents to understand. 'Just throw it in the blue bin' was a simple direction anyone could follow. But the loss of the Chinese and other markets for mixed recyclables is making many realize that if we truly want our discards to be recycled, we need to work harder at properly separating them and making sure everything is clean and dry and free of contamination. California’s Assembly Bill 815, by encouraging a move to dual-stream recycling, is a step in the right direction.”