Measure will require billions of soda, juice and other bottles to contain 50% recycled plastic.

Michael Lujano dumps plastic bottles into the hopper to be weighed as he handles a customer’s recyclables at the Tri-CED recycling facility in Union City, Calif. on Friday, June 9, 2017. (Kristopher Skinner — Bay Area News Group archives)
 

In a move aimed at reducing huge amounts of plastic litter in the ocean and on land, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a first-in-the-nation law requiring plastic beverage containers to contain an increasing amount of recycled material.
 

Under it, companies that produce everything from sports drinks to soda to bottled water must use 15% recycled plastic in their bottles by 2022, 25% recycled plastic by 2025, and 50% recycled plastic by 2030.
 

The bill, AB 793 by Assembly members Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, and Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, was considered to be among the most significant environmental laws that passed this year.

 

In California, roughly 12 billion plastic bottles are sold every year. Although about 70% are recycled, often into other types of plastic packaging, more than 3 billion bottles are not recycled at all, according to state statistics. Most of those are dumped in landfills or discarded as litter in the outdoors.
 

After China stopped accepting many waste plastics two years ago, there has been a glut.
 

“We are doing a really good job of collecting things for recycling,” Murray said. “The difficult part has been finding an end-use market for it. This new law is about closing the loop. Now companies that manufacture the plastic bottles have to buy them back. They’ll have the responsibility.”
 

 “The time has come for companies to step up and help us be good environmental stewards,” Ting said. “By boosting the market for used plastics, fewer containers will end up as litter.”
 

Naked Juice, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, uses bottles made with 100% recycled content for all of its juices. Evian has announced that it will make all its water bottles from 100% recycled plastic by 2025.
 

Plastic waste has become one of the world’s major environmental problems.
 

Half the plastic that has ever existed on Earth was made in the last 13 years. Only 9% of the plastic sold every year in the United States is recycled. Up to 13 million metric tons of it ends up in the world’s oceans each year.