by Katy Grimes, E&E Legal Senior Media Fellow and California Globe Editor
As Appearing in the California Globe

Are all Californians training to be organic farmers?

California’s new mandatory composting law just took effect January 1, 2022. Yes, this is another mandatory climate change law, born out of California’s AB 32, the 2006 California Global Warming Solutions Act, which was born out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s claims that “global warming pollutants have risen to levels unseen in the past 800,000 years.”

Senate Bill 1383, authored in 2016 by then-Senator Ricardo Lara, now California’s State Insurance Commissioner, mandates that your “organic material” goes into separate bins from garbage, plastic and glass recyclables.

Here is Lara’s reason for the bill: “According to the author, ‘California has been a proud and bold leader in pursuing environmental policies to reduce climate change and address the sources that cause it. Those policies have mostly focused on reducing emissions of CO2, the most significant long-term driver of climate change. This strategy represents the next step in those efforts, to establish a goal to reduce short lived climate pollutants that are among the most harmful emissions to both human health and global climate change.’”

This new law, passed in 2016 but not effective until 1/1/2022, is a holdover from Lara’s time in the Legislature and not part of the spate of new environmental laws recently signed in October by Gov. Gavin Newsom designed to restrict use of plastic utensils, change recycling labels, limit exports of plastic waste, and even boosting individual composting. Those new laws will tax plastic forks, spoons and knives, all the while demanding they be recycled.

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