The sweeping regulations, finalized at the start of the month, put producers in a bind that has no obvious solution. Plastic clamshell containers, for instance, protect berries from being crushed and keep them fresher, longer until they reach a refrigerator. Plastic producers say there’s simply no substitute — yet under the new rules, they’ll have to find one. 

Last week, two environmental groups — the Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians Against Waste — said they plan to take California to court. Their argument: the state’s rules actually break the law by allowing recycling methods that create a lot of toxic waste, and by letting some plastics slip through the rules entirely. On the other side, plastic manufacturers say the rules go too far and will make products more expensive for shoppers.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat from coastal Los Angeles County who authored the plastic waste law, said the program still “massively moves the needle on this really major problem” — even if the process was messy. “This was the product of a compromise, and it was not perfect, and everybody walked away from the table, you know, unhappy about various aspects,” Allen said.

“California is the United States, but 30 years in the future,” said Joe Árvai,  director of the University of Southern California’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. “What’s happening now is emblematic of trends that we are seeing worldwide … and the U.S. needs to adapt in the way that those countries are adapting in order to remain globally competitive.”

Less plastic, more recycling 

For decades, the burden of reducing, reusing and recycling plastic waste has fallen on consumers. Once a consumer buys a product, they decide what happens to it — whether it ends up in the garbage can or the recycling blue bin — and their tax dollars fund recycling systems we have today.  

In 2022, California’s landmark Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, shifted that responsibility to businesses. The regulations outline what materials are covered by the law and who counts as a “producer” of plastic waste.  

The new regulations are a huge milestone, said Anja Brandon, director of U.S. plastics policy for the Ocean Conservancy. “There’s plenty more steps on this journey, but I’m just really excited that we are going to start making real progress,” she said. 

The law applies to plastic food service ware and almost all single-use packaging — from the plastic wrap around large pallets of products shipped to retailers to a tube of toothpaste and the cardboard box around it.  

To carry out the law, the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery appointed the Circular Action Alliance, a nonprofit that helps states carry out extended producer responsibility mandates, as the organizing body for producers. The alliance is responsible for coming up with  a plan to meet the law’s goals. 

Producers — defined as companies that make more than $1 million in sales and produce products packaged in plastic or own brands under which those products are sold — must join the organization and pay fees to fund waste management. They can meet the law’s requirements by using less plastic, finding alternative materials, or investing in recycling infrastructure.

“The biggest challenge is the scale and coordination required to modernize a complex recycling system across a state as large and diverse as California,” said Sheila Estaniel, a spokesperson for the Circular Action Alliance, in an email. 

California’s requirement that businesses reduce single-use plastic altogether makes it one of the strongest plastic waste laws in the country. It also goes further than other similar laws because it requires plastic producers to pay $5 billion over a decade to address the environmental damage their products have caused to communities — though the state doesn’t expect to start distributing those funds until 2027 at the earliest.

Watered down rules

The plastic waste rules have had a rocky road to implementation. 

In 2024, CalRecycle developed a first draft of regulations detailing what plastic the law covers and what producers must do. The draft expired before CalRecycle finalized it. In 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom directed regulators to rewrite the rules — a move that some advocates say say food and agriculture lobbyists pushed for.

The result was a second draft that carved out a broad exclusion for plastics used for food and agriculture purposes, covering products under the jurisdiction of the FDA and USDA, such as packaging for fresh produce and supplements. Advocates said the exclusion gutted the law.

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In a study of pregnant women, exposure to phthalates, a group of chemicals found in plastics and other household products, was associated with elevated blood pressure during late pregnancy, as well as long-term changes to blood pressure. The study by scientists at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health is part of their broader findings on the impact of phthalates and cardiometabolic health and the first to examine long-term blood pressure trajectories in relation to phthalate exposure during pregnancy. Findings are published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Phthalates are ubiquitous in the environment in many consumer and household products, including children’s toys and vinyl flooring tiles, as well as scented products like perfumes and air fresheners. Human exposure to phthalates can occur through ingestion, inhalation, and skin absorption. Specific phthalates disrupt the endocrine system, the body’s system for regulating hormones, and exposure to these is linked to developmental health problems, including asthma, childhood brain development, IQ, and thyroid function.

The researchers analyzed urine samples collected from 892 pregnant women in Mexico City for concentrations of 9 phthalate compounds. Higher collective exposure to these compounds was associated with elevated blood pressure in the third trimester, as well as an increased likelihood of having unfavorable blood pressure postpartum.

“These findings suggest that exposure to phthalates during pregnancy may have life-long consequences on the blood pressure trajectory, potentially elevating the risk for chronic illnesses later in life, such as hypertension,” says first author Haotian Wu, PhD, an associate research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School.

In an accompanying editorial, Ivan A. Arenas MD, PhD, Columbia University Division of Cardiology, writes, “the study by Wu and colleagues opens new avenues for research on the role of environmental exposures and blood pressure levels, specifically on the effect of phthalates on pathways regulating blood pressure. The authors used an elegant statistical strategy for the analysis of blood pressure changes after pregnancy in a relatively large cohort of pregnant women. This study provides further evidence that the exposure to synthetic chemicals in food contact materials may result in alterations on cardiovascular function.”

In an earlier study of the same group of pregnant women (the PROGRESS cohort—Programming Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment and Social Stressors) researchers found that phthalate exposure during pregnancy may be associated with markers of metabolic health up to eight years post-delivery and that prenatal maternal phthalate exposures and trajectories of excess body fat from 4 to 12 years.

The researchers say the potential biological mechanisms that underlie the associations of phthalate biomarkers and maternal blood pressure are unclear. They say future studies are necessary on potential changes to blood pressure trajectories in early pregnancy, as well as other long-term health consequences. “There is a paucity of research examining phthalate exposures and maternal health, particularly in the years following pregnancy. Our findings suggest that prenatal exposures to phthalates may influence women’s cardiometabolic health and will hopefully stimulate future research regarding potential changes to blood pressure, and other risk factors, during early pregnancy, as well as long-term consequences,” says Andrea Deierlein, PhD, senior author, and assistant professor of public health nutrition at NYU School of Global Health.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (ES023474, ES027508, ES021357, ES009089, ES024381, ES023515, ES013744, ES014930, ES028522).  

Study co-authors include Allison Kupsco and Andrea Baccarelli at Columbia Mailman; Allan Just, Alison Sanders, and Robert Wright at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Antonia Calafat at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Emily Oken at Harvard Medical School; Joseph Braun at Brown University; Adriana Mercado-Garcia, Alejandra Cantoral, and Martha Téllez-Rojo at National Institute of Public Health, Morelos, Mexico; Ivan Pantic, National Institute of Perinatology, Mexico City; and Andrea L. Deierlein, New York University.

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