Every minute, Californians rip open tens of thousands of packages and buy, wear, donate, resell, or discard thousands of articles of clothing — an astonishing flow of materials through one of the world’s largest economies.
For more than two centuries, we’ve managed that flow with a linear operating system: take, make, use, throw away. That generated extraordinary prosperity, but also externalized many costs onto taxpayers, communities, future generations, and nature.
But California is now attempting something new. Like California’s landmark CRV bottle bill before it, EPR shifts responsibility for the costs of waste from ratepayers to the producers who design and sell products. Once waste becomes a business cost instead of someone else’s aproblem, companies have an incentive to reduce it.
That creates continuous feedback. And continuous feedback is how nature evolves.
The circular economy is not simply better recycling. It is a different operating system — one that works more like an ecosystem than a machine, adapting, diversifying, and continuously improving. Properly designed, it can reduce both environmental impacts and business costs by using less energy, fewer raw materials, and smarter product design.
California is becoming the world’s largest laboratory for that experiment. The early results are both inspiring and cautionary.
Glimpses of a truly circular future include:
SB 54 is forcing producers to rethink packaging in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
California’s new textile EPR law builds on the remarkable growth of resale, repair, rental, and recommerce.
BEAM Circular is making the Central Valley a circular bioeconomy hub, bringing together farmers, universities, investors, and local communities to transform agricultural waste into new materials and renewable chemicals.
The Footwear Collective’s Los Angeles-based pilot collected over 30,000 pounds of shoes through Goodwill locations, learning what it will take to keep footwear from competing brands in circulation and build a scalable, shared system for their end-of-life.
Following a successful reusable cup pilot in Petaluma, Closed Loop Partners’ Reuse Cities initiative, launching in San Diego, will require competing businesses, logistics providers, and consumers to cooperate in ways our old linear economy never demanded.
But we are also carrying adversarial habits into a new era. Republican state attorneys general are suing to stop California’s packaging EPR law. Environmental organizations and industry groups continue battling one another over its implementation. Proposed restrictions on chemical recycling and mass balance accounting threaten to eliminate tools that may prove indispensable for recycling plastic packaging and polyester textiles at scale.
Californians have always been willing to invent the future. Now we can invent a new environmentalism — one that still speaks hard truths and holds institutions accountable, but measures success not by the battles it wins, but by how continuously it improves the world we share.
California has done this before. The CRV bottle bill succeeded because environmentalists, businesses, retailers, recyclers, and government eventually chose problem-solving over permanent warfare. SB 54 itself emerged from years of negotiation among groups that decided collaboration could accomplish what conflict alone could not.
If Californians genuinely reduce waste and protect ecosystems, we can also reduce costs and improve our quality of life. By consuming fewer materials and less energy, circular systems are designed to save both producers and consumers money. More importantly, they can help restore what the industrial economy too often separated: our connection to one another, to ourselves, and to the natural world.
This story first appeared in the August 2026 issue of Resource Recycling Magazine.
