California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill that aims to limit some recycled plastic bottles in the state from being used in making carpets, a first-in-the-U.S. provision that supporters say will boost recycled PET for beverage packaging.
The PET bottle provision is a small part of a much larger law, known as Assembly Bill 863, to reform the state's carpet recycling system. Newsom announced late Sept. 27 that he had signed the bill into law.
The new law requires carpet makers to have 5 percent recycled content from used carpets in their products sold in the state by 2028, but it does not allow them to count recycled material from PET bottles toward meeting that.
Supporters said the carpet law will help preserve recycled PET bottles so that more are available for beverage makers to meet a mandate under another California law, AB-793, to have 50 percent recycled content by 2030 in plastic bottles covered by the state's container deposit system.
"Beverage bottlers, like Niagara, are leading the way in increasing recycled content in our plastic bottles while also under some of the strictest recycling content mandates; therefore, bottlers need as much #1 plastic from the marketplace as possible," said Brian Hess, executive vice president of Niagara Bottling LLC, in a Sept. 29 statement from the National Stewardship Action Council, a strong supporter of AB-863.
"Unfortunately, carpet manufacturers are using about 30 percent of that valuable #1 plastic in carpets," said Hess. "AB-863 calls for carpet-to-carpet recycling ensuring the availability of more #1 plastic bottles made from recycled content."
NSAC said about one-third of plastic water bottles in the United States are recycled into carpet and that AB-863 would help "to keep food-grade plastic such as water bottles at their highest and best use as recycled, food-grade materials."
The provision was also supported by the International Bottled Water Association, which said in a letter to California state lawmakers in August, ahead of their final vote on the bill, that the legislation would help ensure that more "high-quality, food-grade post-consumer plastic such as [PET] water bottles" are available for bottle-to-bottle closed loop recycling.
Earlier versions of AB-863 had required up to 30 percent carpet-to-carpet recycled content in new carpets by 2035, but that was dropped to 5 percent by 2028 in the final language.