California Reintroduces Law that Warrants Recycling of Plastic Bottle Caps

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster):  Environmental groups and a few legislators in California have decided to reintroduce a bill that requires bottle caps to be tied to plastic beverage bottles. The legislation, which calls for banning of bottles that don’t have caps attached to them, is expected to bring down one of the prominent sources of plastic litter in the state.

Mark Stone- a member of the state Assembly and author of legislation, who proposed the Bill 2779, stated that plastic caps are one among the major pollutants in beaches and neighborhoods. The state of California has made significant investments to ensure that plastic bottles are prevented from ending up in landfills, by offering proper recycled options to customers. The state now needs to change the law so as to make sure that bottle caps too are recycled. Tethering caps to plastic bottles offers the best solution to prevent caps from polluting the environment, Stone said.

As per the proposed bill, all single-use plastic bottles will be required to have caps attached to the bottles. The companies will be given time to make necessary changes to their bottling machinery. Post the deadline date, which is yet to be decided, bottles without attached caps cannot be used. Incidentally, estimates suggest that only around 1 billion caps out of the 6.9 billion plastic bottles opened every day gets recycled.

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A similar legislation, introduced by Stone, had passed the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources on 7-3 vote in January 2017. However, further progress was stalled as it failed to come up for vote before the whole assembly before the end of the Jan 30 deadline, following lack of adequate support from fellow Assemblymen. The bill would have required all plastic bottles to have tethered caps by 2020.

It must be noted that Assemblyman Ian Calderon had introduced a bill last month, which would prohibit issue of plastic straws by dine-in restaurants, unless upon customer’s request. The bill aims to protect the environment by limiting the use of straws, without banning them.