A fight in Sacramento over how to regulate pollution from recycling plastics has drawn in a group of environmental justice activists in Modesto.
At issue is California’s four-year-old Senate Bill 54 and its lack of clarity around regulating pyrolysis, a chemical recycling technology that has raised concerns among environmental watchdogs.
For Thomas Helme, a Modesto-based environmental justice advocate, the pyrolysis debate recalls a decades-long fight against an incineration plant that burned waste in Stanislaus County for 35 years.
“The path to where we were – doing workshops, meetings with community members, local officials, city and county staff about waste – was because of the work we were doing around the incinerator,” Helme said.
Now, Helme is bringing that experience to his role as a member of California’s SB 54 Packaging Producer Responsibility Advisory Board, a state-appointed body that makes recommendations for implementing SB 54.
“One of the reasons I applied to be on this board was because of a conversation when I was learning about SB 54 [where] they said, if this doesn’t go right, you could be looking at a pyrolysis facility where your incinerator used to be,” Helme said. … “My one goal was to make sure that didn’t happen.”
In 2012, Helme, along with Emiliano Mataka and Bianca Lopez, co-founded the Modesto‑based environmental justice group Valley Improvement Projects. Out of the gate, VIP joined a fight to shut down the incinerator in Stanislaus County. The group ran “zero waste” workshops in small towns like Grayson and Crows Landing, and pressed local officials to cut single‑use plastics rather than chase new ways to burn or melt them.
The incinerator plant shut down in 2024. Now, SB 54 is slated to steer billions of dollars over the next 10 years toward cleaning up pollution from plastics, and Helme is trying to keep solutions that could result in hazardous waste from landing in the same communities that lived with the last one.
“Communities of color and low‑income communities carry more of the burden of plastic pollution than other communities,” he said.
Incineration burns waste directly in the presence of oxygen, converting it to ash and gas, often while generating electricity. Pyrolysis, by contrast, heats plastics, tires, plant waste and everyday trash in a sealed, oxygen-free chamber until it breaks down into oil, gas and an ash-like residue called char. It’s a process the waste industry markets as a cleaner alternative to burning trash, but the EPA has described real-world pyrolysis as a two-chamber incinerator: an oxygen-starved first chamber, followed by a second “afterburner” chamber that completes combustion of the remaining gases.
Researchers who have studied pyrolysis plants describe a messier picture: the process can release toxic byproducts into the air and the ground, including dioxins, which, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, can cause cancer and can also harm a person’s liver, immune system and ability to have healthy babies.
What is SB 54 supposed to do?
In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, into law. The bill requires companies that sell single-use packaging and plastic foodware in California to cut plastic waste and shift the costs of recycling and disposal from taxpayers to producers.
SB 54 also requires CalRecycle, the state agency that regulates recycling and waste disposal, to write regulations excluding any plastic recycling technology that produces “significant amounts of hazardous waste” from counting toward the law’s recycling-rate targets, but the statute sets no threshold or definition of hazardous waste.
CalRecycle filled that gap by adopting the federal standard for what counts as hazardous waste. As a result, a substance considered hazardous waste under California’s tougher standard, such as byproducts generated from pyrolysis, could still pass the federal test.
Circular Action Alliance (CAA), the group representing producers of single-use plastic packaging and food-service ware, is now applying the federal standard in a “producer responsibility plan” it’s drafting as a requirement of SB 54.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit international environmental advocacy group, said CalRecycle got it wrong. In written comments filed with CalRecycle on Oct. 7, 2025, NRDC suggested that California should use its own, broader rule for hazardous waste rather than the narrower federal one.
The group also pointed to a letter State Sen. Ben Allen, author of SB 54, wrote to make his intent clear. The same day the Senate gave SB 54 its final 29-0 vote, Allen wrote that “technologies using pyrolysis, gasification, solvolysis, and similar technologies that involve combustion and incineration, as well as the generation of hazardous waste, are therefore prohibited from being considered ‘recycling’ under SB 54.”
CalRecycle disagreed, saying it picked the federal rule because pyrolysis waste “may ultimately be processed outside of California.”
CAA is using that same federal rule to say pyrolysis counts as recycling.
“When we’re designing a plan, and the regulations are structured in a specific way that allows for certain recycling technologies, we’re not going to close those off,” said Shane Buckingham, chief of staff at CAA and advisory board member. “We’ve outlined a way to address the hazardous waste requirements in the regulations to ensure that any recycling technologies that do produce those types of waste are not producing a significant amount.”
The CAA’s draft
On June 26, the Packaging Producer Responsibility Advisory Board gathered in Sacramento, where CAA’s draft plan drew scrutiny from board members and the public. The advisory board, which operates under CalRecycle, is made up of state-appointed members representing the private sector, local government and advocacy groups, including VIP.
About a hundred other stakeholders – some advocating for plastic producers, some pushing for environmental safety and justice – filled out the meeting, where the issue of pyrolysis came up early and often.
“It should be about preventing the implementation of dangerous waste-generating technologies that are expensive, and they give cover for the creation of more plastic waste,” said Rita O’Connell, a national organizer with the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. “I would strongly ask you to consider whether you would allow such a facility in your own community or backyard before you consider allowing one near anyone else’s.”
In addition to cancer-causing dioxins and other harmful byproducts, heavy metals often found in pyrolysis emissions carry their own risks: lead exposure is linked to neurological damage, particularly in children, while cadmium is classified as a human carcinogen tied to kidney damage and lung cancer, according to ATSDR toxicological profiles.
Buckingham defended the draft producer responsibility plan, adding that SB 54 does not mention transformation or pyrolysis in its list of recycling exclusions.
“The statute could have but did not categorically exclude specified chemical recycling technologies such as pyrolysis,” Buckingham said. “Rather, it directed CalRecycle to develop criteria to evaluate such technologies and to exclude them if they produce significant amounts of hazardous waste.”
Stanislaus County residents get an incinerator
In 1984, the California Waste Management Board paid a Los Angeles consulting firm, Cerrell Associates, to answer a single question: which communities would put up the least fight against a trash incinerator?
Cerrell used data on race, ethnicity, income, education and rates of non-English speakers to assess possible site locations, including Stanislaus County. In 1985, a year after the Cerrell Report’s findings, the city of Modesto and Stanislaus County signed a deal that led to the construction of a facility at the county’s Fink Road Landfill, operated by the Stanislaus Waste Energy Company, a subsidiary of Ogden Martin Systems, a waste-to-energy company based in New Jersey that rebranded as Covanta in 2001 and as Reworld in 2024.
The incinerator went online in 1989 and, according to Reworld, burned an average of 260,000 tons of residential garbage and commercial waste collected from the nine cities in Stanislaus County each year. The material also included construction debris, tires and discarded household appliances.
In October 2015, more than 25 years after the incinerator opened, Senate Bill 350 declared that plants burning municipal solid waste don’t count as sources of renewable energy, so the plant lost the extra revenue stream from its renewable status.
In 2017, state regulators took away the plant’s exemption from buying carbon pollution credits under cap-and-trade, and local air-quality regulators added a new rule around the same time, ordering the plant to install pollution-control equipment by 2024. Then, in September 2022, Assembly Bill 1857, co-sponsored by VIP, cut the county’s ability to count incinerated trash toward its state-mandated recycling targets, wiping out the last financial incentive to treat incineration as recycling.
By 2023, the math no longer worked. An engineering firm studied five alternatives to the incinerator and found that none were financially sustainable. By late 2024, Reworld told Modesto and the county it couldn’t afford to keep the incinerator running. The plant closed for good on Dec. 2, 2024.
Modesto and the county split a $4 million early termination settlement – 58% to Modesto and 42% to the county – and divided an $8 million reserve fund the same way. The closure also means the county’s only landfill is now on pace to fill up nearly 10 years earlier than its 2050 target.
For Helme, the shutdown was the win VIP had spent over a decade fighting for, and created his path to the advisory board now debating the implementation of SB 54. For Lopez, the pull toward environmental justice goes back further than the incinerator.
The community fight
Lopez said the health toll of living near industrial pollution became personal long before she moved to Stanislaus County. She grew up in Cudahy, a Los Angeles County city where, she said, her brother’s school was built in part atop a former toxic waste site.
“They built a school on top of a bunch of, like, oil barrels,” Lopez said. “And that stuff started to leak, and it was seeping out of the cement, and teachers were getting sick, kids were getting headaches.”
In 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported that after years of complaints about petroleum puddles surfacing during the summer months, the Los Angeles school board opted to seal the Park Avenue Elementary playground with a plastic liner topped with a layer of asphalt. A decade later, low levels of arsenic were detected on the playground.
In 2015, a battery recycling facility near Cudahy was forced to shut down after multiple reports revealed high levels of lead and arsenic contamination, resulting in elevated cancer risks. The findings reinforced Lopez’s long-held suspicion that her mother’s breast cancer was tied to toxic pollution where they lived.
“They put up these door hangers all around Cudahy that said, ‘By the way, this house is built on top of a toxic site,'” she said. “At the time, I knew that it was messed up, but I didn’t know how to act or what to do about it.”
Lopez’s mother died of breast cancer at 59, nearly seven years ago. Lopez said she did not learn until later in life that the community she was raised in had been polluted for decades.
She eventually met environmental justice advocates across the state and joined their efforts to stop pollution from making communities sick.
“We want to expose the sources of pollution so people become aware, make an informed decision and be civically engaged,” she said. “Most of our time and our commitment is in the disadvantaged communities, monolingual communities, predominantly Latino here in Stanislaus County. It’s the Black and brown communities who are often sacrificed or live in sacrifice zones where pollution and contamination is situated.”
The SB 54 pushback
SB 54 is now caught between two lawsuits pulling in opposite directions. One suit says the law isn’t strict enough. The other says it goes too far.
At the center of it all is a legal gray area: Does California’s older list of recycling exclusions still apply, or does SB 54’s newer, shorter list replace it?
The first lawsuit came in June, when the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with two advocacy groups, sued CalRecycle in San Francisco Superior Court. The NRDC argues that CAA’s draft plan wrongly counts pyrolysis as recycling. It also objects to a provision of SB 54 that allows plastic producers to pull money from the law’s mitigation fund to help pay for pyrolysis plants, which the group says violates the law itself.
The second lawsuit, also filed in June, aims to loosen regulations. Nebraska, 16 other states, and a trade group called the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors sued CalRecycle and CAA in federal court. Their claim: SB 54 illegally forces California’s packaging rules on out-of-state companies that never agreed to follow them. Treating in-state and out-of-state businesses differently, they argue, violates the U.S. Constitution.
NAW says its members would get caught in the regulatory crossfire. The problem, according to NAW, is how SB 54 defines a plastic producer. If the company that actually makes a product has no operations in California, the law can instead pin that “producer” label on the retailer or distributor selling it. That means NAW’s members could be held responsible for packaging choices they never made.
And the case boils down to a bigger question: Can one state use its market power to set packaging rules for the whole country?
Both cases are still pending. No hearing dates have been set.
More confusion
Toward the end of the June 26 meeting of the Packaging Producer Responsibility Advisory Board, after a few hours of public comment, the board turned to its own members for final questions. Helme took the floor and expressed frustration that, deep into the implementation process, the board was still debating the definition of recycling and whether pyrolysis is lawful in California.
“I still don’t understand, with those definitions, I’ve been told over and over again by people smarter than me, ‘don’t worry, this can’t happen because of these definitions in California,’” Helme said. “Why is it still such an issue that it seems like we’re still not clear on exactly if this is allowed? Is it going to be allowed?”
No one answered.
Xavier Zamora is The Intersection’s reporting intern from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He covers health equity in the San Joaquin Valley.
You must be logged in to post a comment.