Advanced recycling is booming except in California. A new plastics law is to blame

Visitor Commentary written by

Robert C. Lapsley

Robert Lapsley is the president of the California Enterprise Roundtable.

In water-starved California, synthetic turf is an environmental necessity, decreasing the necessity for irrigation, mowing, pesticides and fertilizers. Final month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed laws incentivizing garden homeowners to make the change as native governments throughout the state provide rebates that assist make artificial turf extra reasonably priced. 

Whereas these applications are nice for safeguarding California’s scarce pure assets, they do nothing for landscapers and sports activities venues trying to get rid of synthetic grass worn out by years of heavy use. A brand new private-sector recycling partnership might be a path ahead, however the state’s shortsighted insurance policies forestall higher adoption. 

Turf from sports activities and leisure fields is usually repurposed in secondary markets like batting cages or residential landscaping. However on the finish of its life, it’s simply waste. Conventional recycling strategies usually are not efficient with first- and second-generation synthetic turf because it’s comprised of yarn and backing supplies that aren’t product of a single polymer. In consequence, it leads to landfills.

A number one provider of artificial turf for sports activities and panorama lately introduced a first-of-its-kind partnership to maintain synthetic turf from ending up in landfills. The initiative by TenCate Grass will recycle 50 end-of-life synthetic turf fields from excessive colleges and school campuses in California, together with Stanford College. 

Every synthetic turf will probably be delivered to Cyclyx Worldwide in Texas, which focuses on making ready hard-to-recycle plastics for processing. The product then goes to ExxonMobil’s superior recycling facility in Baytown. The ability has processed thousands and thousands of kilos of plastic waste, and can quickly be amongst North America’s largest superior plastic recycling services.

California needs to be dwelling to comparable services, outfitted with the expertise to rework a wider vary of previous plastics like synthetic grass again into the essential constructing blocks of recent merchandise. In a state with 63,000 sq. miles of water-hungry lawns, reclaiming and reusing synthetic grass is simply frequent sense.

Sadly, relatively than develop the expertise, a sweeping new regulation on plastics and recycling contains provisions that discourage superior recycling by limiting which applied sciences can rely towards so-called circularity targets. Senate Invoice 54 is an instance of how short-term considering can halt investments which might be good for shoppers, good for jobs and good for the environment.

In distinction, at the very least 20 different states have handed legal guidelines to draw new superior recycling tasks, serving to spur a wave of innovation that will probably be very important to assembly the surging demand for merchandise made with recycled materials. There are at the very least seven superior recycling services working within the U.S., with the potential for billions of {dollars} in further investments. 

This new interstate partnership will certainly reveal how efficient new superior recycling options will be, and the way badly they’re wanted in California the place plastics play a key position in all the pieces from wind generators and surgical gloves to synthetic grass. 

Let’s hope lawmakers are listening to the unintended penalties of SB 54 and are available again to the dialog ready to make adjustments that may open doorways for a extra round economic system, not shut them.