Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times

California voters in November will not only decide whether to uphold the state’s plastic bag ban, but will also whether to redirect fees on paper and reusable bags to environmental projects.

Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Wednesday announced that a bag fee initiative, backed by the plastic bag industry, has qualified for the Nov. 8 statewide ballot.

The American Progressive Bag Alliance submitted nearly 600,000 signatures in favor of the initiative after it gathered  more than 800,000 signatures on petitions for a referendum on the statewide bag ban.

The bag ban law “has never been about protecting the environment,” Lee Califf, executive director of the bag alliance, said in a prepared statement. “This measure gives voters the opportunity to make sure that any state-mandated fee will go to environmental causes, which is what voters thought they were getting in the first place.”

The ballot measure would require stores to deposit their bag sale proceeds into a special fund administered by the Wildlife Conservation Board. It would mandate the board develop regulations to implement the law.

An analysis by the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office has estimated that revenue redirected from retailers to environmental efforts could total tens of millions of dollars annually.

If the referendum is successful in stopping the statewide ban on single-use bags, then the initiative would only impact bag fees in communities with local bans in place.

Reprinted from the Sacramento Bee (6/27/2016)

Recyclers and grocery stores would get a reprieve from the causes and fallout of a wave of recycling center closures – and policymakers could get prodded toward a larger deal – under a budget bill that passed the Assembly on Monday.

Hundreds of facilities that pay cash for used bottles and cans have closed around the state this year, with recyclers placing much of the blame on lower subsidies from the state’s recycling fund. If recycling centers vanish, grocery stores become obligated to take back recyclables themselves or face fines, so the California Grocers Association has been lobbying for a grace period.

A short-term fix initially failed to make it into the budget. Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration favors a broader overhaul of California’s wobbly recycling system, which has faced annual deficits in the tens of millions of dollars.

But amid a late lobbying push by grocers, retailers, recyclers and organized labor, the Assembly crafted a stopgap measure that would freeze payments to recyclers at higher 2015 rates and give grocers a reprieve through April of 2017. The Senate and Brown still need to approve the measure.

There’s a catch: Payments to everyone involved in the teeming recycling ecosystem, from manufacturers to supermarkets, would halt altogether as of April 2017. Lawmakers said that impending loss of funds would give parties an incentive to produce a deal.

“We felt strongly there needed to be a temporary solution,” said Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D-Menlo Park, but with the 2017 deadline, “it sets a cliff, essentially,” that all parties will want to avoid tumbling off of.
Read more here.

: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article86294562.html#storylink=cpy

Reprinted from The Sacramento Bee

Blue bins piled high with gleaming cans and pink plastic bags bulging with plastic jugs snaked up to the recycling center outside a Foods Co. on a recent Wednesday morning, with customers lined up to cash in their containers.

A homeless man named Aaron Viramontes said he stops by two to three times a week in search of cash. Another customer who arrived in a minivan loaded with boxes full of bottles said he always brings his empties to the center – “I paid for it in the store,” he noted, “so I should get my money back.”

But completing that transaction could get tougher. The company that runs the facility, RePlanet, has already closed scores of California locations amid a financial crunch that has gotten the attention of policymakers in Sacramento. Nearby centers had already stopped accepting items, and some customers had noticed.

“The question is, where would we recycle” if the closures continue? said John Viernes, a 29-year-old physical therapist who said he got into the habit of bringing his cans and bottles to recycling centers in Hawaii, where “the soil is sacred.” “It would be tough.”

The shuttering of hundreds of recycling centers around California has reduced opportunities to cash in bottles and cans while stirring anxiety for grocery store owners who may be forced to start accepting reusable materials themselves. As interest groups press policymakers for a solution, the situation has again illuminated the ongoing challenges facing California’s labyrinthine recycling system.

“This is a crisis for consumers who aren’t going to be able to get their money back on the containers they’ve purchased,” said Californians Against Waste executive director Mark Murray, “it’s a crisis of the stores who aren’t fond of taking containers back inside the store, and it’s a crisis for recycling centers who want to be in the business of taking back containers but can’t make it work in this financial market.”

Recycling facilities like those you see in grocery store parking lots receive subsidies from the state. Those payouts – determined either by subtracting the average value of scrap materials from the average cost of recycling or by using a survey to determine the average per-container cost of recycling, depending on the type of facility – help recycling centers stay financially viable.

Grocery stores and other places that sell recyclable materials like beverage containers, meanwhile, rely on those recycling centers. State law mandates that sellers either have on-site recycling facilities or sit within a half mile of one. If not, they are on the hook to either accept reusable items themselves or pay a $100-a-day fine.

Citing lower payments from the state and increased labor costs, the recycling giant RePlanet announced in January it had shut down 191 centers (a representative did not respond to requests for comment). According to CalRecycle, 298 went offline in the first quarter of this year. The per-container cost survey compels the state to slash payments to supermarket-based centers another 11 percent on July 1.

Legislators pressing for a response say constituents are already feeling the strain.

“Rural communities, in many cases in Northern California, have few if any locations to be able to recycle their cans and bottles,” said Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and in more urban areas, “the public is having to wait sometimes upwards of two hours to be able to have their recyclables processed.”

A complex system of interlocking fees and payments, California’s recycling system has been undermined by its own popularity.

It’s funded largely by upfront fees on each container sold in California. But as more people recycle, more money leaves the system – both from people cashing in bottles and cans and from curbside collectors gleaning payments, among other transactions. As a result, in recent years the system has allocated more than it takes in by the tens of millions.

Global commodity prices largely explain the current woes of recycling centers. The plummeting scrap value of recyclable materials like aluminum and glass has hurt their bottom line, and the number of centers statewide has dipped from around 2,100 to under 1,800 in recent years.

“Falling commodities prices” have “really had an impact on the health of our industry,” said Joe Pickard. chief economist for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. “2015 was the worst year we’ve seen, probably, in not just a decade but in a generation.”

To a large extent, Pickard said, tempering that volatility is “really beyond or government or our industry’s control” given the system’s reliance on global economic forces. But some California policymakers want to give CalRecycle the flexibility to respond more rapidly to how shifting prices determine what recyclers get paid.

“The program … is not nimble enough to deal with changes in the commodity market,” said Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D-Menlo Park.

An alarmed grocery industry has pleaded with Sacramento for assistance as the wave of closures has unfolded.

“The choice is to either take that garbage at a checkout line, which we would fear health inspectors coming in and saying no to that (or) the alternative is paying $36,500” each year, said Aaron Moreno, a lobbyist for the California Grocers Association. “Grocery stores should get some kind of relief, because this is a situation where we literally did nothing wrong.”

Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration has pushed back on calls for a short-term fix, declining to get behind a stopgap budget proposal – backed by the grocers and by Murray’s organization – that would have frozen the processing payment and handling fee rates and given grocery stores an 18-month reprieve from the proximity-to-recyclers mandate.

Better than a short-term fix that would have cost the state recycling fund around $22 million a year, said a spokesman for the state Department of Finance, would be an overarching deal that looks broadly at how to reshape California’s recycling program.

“We’ve been pushing for a comprehensive solution, going back a couple years, to get the (recycling) fund on an even keel,” said spokesman H.D. Palmer.

A working group headed by McGuire has been negotiating a larger deal. Ideas kicked around so far have included increasing the processing fee levied on beverage manufacturers or limiting how much the program offsets what they pay; reducing the amount consumers can claim; letting CalRecycle more easily adjust what it pays recycling centers to reflect the shifting global commodities market; and expanding the universe of containers the program accepts.

But forging a deal could take time, and meanwhile, McGuire and others are pushing for a temporary fix.

“It is going to be a long, challenging summer if grocers are having to take in recyclables from residents within their communities,” McGuire said.
Read more here.

Occurs week before Vermont labeling law takes effect
(reprinted from Progressive Grocer – 6/24/2016)

Two U.S. senators have reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation requiring the first mandatory, nationwide label for food products containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), one week before a GMO labeling law takes effect in Vermont.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the committee chairman, reached the agreement, which would be more lenient than Vermont’s law requiring on-pack labeling of GMO ingredients, and allow food companies to communicate via a text label, symbol or electronic label accessible via smartphone. Vermont’s law, on the other hand, would require items to be labeled “produced with genetic engineering.”

The two senators believe their agreement would close “glaring loopholes” in the Vermont law; for instance, a cheese pizza could be labeled, but a pepperoni pizza could not, even if it contained a GMO ingredient.

“This bipartisan bill is a win for consumers and families,” Stabenow said. “For the first time ever, consumers will have a national, mandatory label for food products that contain genetically modified ingredients.

“This proposal is also a win for our nation’s farmers and food producers,” she continued. “Throughout this process I worked to ensure that any agreement would recognize the scientific consensus that biotechnology is safe, while also making sure consumers have the right to know what is in their food. I also wanted a bill that prevents a confusing patchwork of 50 different rules in each state. This bill achieved all of those goals, and most importantly recognizes that consumers want more information about the foods they buy.”

Additionally, Stabenow fought for important provisions to maintain the integrity of the nation’s organic program. Although organics have always been non-GMO, this agreement ensures organic producers can clearly display a “non-GMO” label in addition to the organic seal, providing additional information to consumers about the food they eat.

Finally, the agreement contains important provisions that uphold consumer protection laws at both the state and federal levels. Stabenow worked to secure these provisions to ensure that the bill would not impede on states’ rights.

The agreement received support from several industry associations. Leslie Sarasin, president and CEO of the Food Marketing Institute, commended Stabenow and Roberts, urging other senators to promptly vote in favor of the compromise.

“A national standard for GMO labeling is essential if we are to avoid the economic costs incurred by a patchwork of differing state laws,” she said. “By preventing this patchwork, the Roberts-Stabenow agreement will avoid greater consumer confusion, allow efficiency and enable the industry to proceed in a more orderly and reasonable fashion to provide consumers the information they want. We and the 800 other Coalition for Safe Affordable Food member organizations nationwide stand ready to do all we can to work for rapid passage of the agreement.”

Meanwhile, Pamela G. Bailey, president and CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, hailed the compromise as a “common-sense solution” for consumers, businesses and farmers.

“The Senate needs to pass this bill quickly,” she stated. “This bipartisan agreement ensures consumers across the nation can get clear, consistent information about their food and beverage ingredients and prevents a patchwork of confusing and costly state labeling laws.

“We thank Senators Roberts and Stabenow for their hard work and leadership to find the solution that can give consumers more information about genetically engineered ingredients and prevent different state labeling laws,” she continued. “It is critically important that Congress approve this legislation as soon as possible because Vermont’s mandatory labeling law is already having negative impacts.”

However, organizations such as the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) criticized the bill, saying it “tramples” on consumers’ rights.

“The anti-consumer bill unveiled by Stabenow and Roberts, bought and paid for by Big Food corporations, nullifies Vermont’s mandatory GMO-labeling law, and replaces it with a law that replaces the requirement for clear, on-package labels with a convoluted, inconvenient and discriminatory scheme involving barcodes and 1-800 numbers,” said Ronnie Cummins, international director, OCA. “The proposed bill also gives food corporations another two years before they are even required to pretend to provide consumers with any information at all about the GMO ingredients in their products. Stabenow and Roberts are determined to preempt Vermont’s law, even though major food corporations such as General Mills, Campbell’s, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Mars, Kellogg’s, ConAgra are already labeling, to comply with Vermont’s July 1 deadline for labeling.”