Producer responsibility organization Circular Action Alliance is less than three months out from submitting its program plan in California, despite the lack of finalized regulations for SB 54 and only recently released needs assessment sections.
CAA staff discussed progress at an SB 54 advisory board meeting on Friday. “We are on track to submit our program plan to this advisory board on June 15,” said Emily Coven, CAA’s California lead. A 60-day public comment period is slated to begin June 15. The sooner comments are submitted, the better, Coven said. “So that's your summer vacation light reading on the beach, is the program plan for SB 54,” she said.
CalRecycle last week resubmitted regulations for SB 54, California’s extended producer responsibility and source reduction law, to the state’s Office of Administrative Law for approval, CAA noted in a LinkedIn post on Monday. This follows previous delays and pullbacks. OAL has 30 working days to approve or reject the regulations.
Coven said that some insights from the needs assessment could make their way into the program plan, but given that CAA is already deep into the editing and review process, it’s more likely that they could wind up in an appendix to be addressed separately.
CAA noted that once the SB 54 regulations are approved, producers will have 30 days to report their 2023 baseline supply data to CAA. The PRO expects that the reporting deadline will likely fall sometime in May.
So far in California, CAA has received more than 2,000 producer reports covering the 95 covered material categories with 2023 baseline data that can be used for source reduction planning, CAA Chief of Staff Shane Buckingham said in a presentation at the meeting. CAA still needs to receive at least 700 more reports.
“Right now, we're just using the needs assessment study that has estimated the baseline. So we are continuing our data modeling efforts. We are building the source reduction planning,” Buckingham said. He also said CAA aims to publish estimated fee rate ranges May 1 so that producers can start to plan budgets for 2027.
There are still producers holding out on reporting. “We've got producers that will not submit reports until there are final regulations,” Buckingham said. “We've had a very strong showing from the producer community in spite of having regulatory uncertainty, because they do want to be prepared. But there are a lot of producers that are waiting for that clarity.”
Mirroring multiple other states where CAA is implementing future packaging EPR programs, there will also be a May 31 reporting deadline in California this year to inform future years’ fees. That deadline will be for supply and source reduction reporting based on data from 2025.
