US environmental group Sierra Club (San Francisco, California; www.sierraclub.org) has filed lawsuits in US federal court in California against American soft drinks giant Coca-Cola (Atlanta, Georgia; www.coca-colacompany.com) and major water bottler BlueTriton, formerly known as Nestlé Waters North America (Stamford, Connecticut; www.nestle-watersna.com), saying the companies are misleading consumers about the recyclability of some of their plastic packaging.

According to a copy of the lawsuit, the group charges the companies with “unlawful, unfair, and deceptive business practices with respect to the advertising, marketing, and sale of water bottled in single-use plastic bottles labelled as ‘100% Recyclable’”. Additionally, the suit says the companies violated several standards established by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the State of California.

The lawsuits seek to prohibit the companies from selling water bottled in single-use plastics (SUPs) labelled as fully recyclable, and ask the court to declare such claims of recyclability as fraudulent and unlawful. Court documents outline Sierra Club’s position, which is that the plastic bottles are not 100% recyclable because polypropylene bottle caps and biaxially oriented PP plastic labels are not recyclable and cannot be processed into usable material, that at least 28% of PET bottles and HDPE caps are lost in processing or end up in landfills or burned, and US facilities can only recycle 22.5% of PET and HDPE consumed in the US.

According to the FTC’s “Green Guides”, which help companies understand what constitutes deceptive or misleading trade practices, “for a product to be called recyclable, there must be an established recycling program, municipal or private, through which the product will be converted into, or used in, another product or package”.

According to a report compiled by US-based Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR, Washington D.C.; www.plasticsrecycling.org), the volume of PET bottles recovered in 2019 fell nearly 18,000 t to 793,000 t, which dropped the PET bottle recycling rate a percentage point to 27.9% (see Plasteurope.com of 07.07.2021).

In other news from the Golden State, California’s upper house has introduced the “Truth in Labeling for Recyclable Materials” bill that seeks to reduce consumer confusion about which plastics are recyclable. The legislation builds on the “Truth in Environmental Advertising” law, which prohibits the use of the word “recyclable” on products that fail to meet the proper reclaim standards, extending the law to include the chasing-arrows symbol, which most consumers believe denotes recyclability, according to California senator Ben Allen, who introduced the bill. Proponents of the legislation say the clarification will reduce contamination in the state’s recycling system and enable consumers to make more informed choices.

However, US-based Plastics Industry Association (Plastics, Washington, D.C.; www.plasticsindustry.org) says the bill would send more material to landfills and reduce recycling due the “severely restrictive” criteria for determining recyclability. Only PET and HDPE bottles would be accepted as recyclable across the state, which could produce unintended yet extensive negative environmental outcomes, said Shannon Crawford, the association’s director of state government affairs.