On August 13, 2026 the California Senate Appropriations Committee sent AB 2253 (Boerner) out on a 5-2 vote, do pass as amended. The bill was read a second time, amended, and now sits on the Senate second reading file. The substance moved in the opposite direction from what the bill was known for. The prohibition on credit-based mass balance accounting was
struck by the July 2, 2026 amendment, and the August 13 amendment expressly
permits a claim based on “proportional attribution, as defined in ISO standard 22095-2:2026, as long as no recycling credits are provided to any form of fuel use or fuel production and without credit transfers between unrelated processes,” alongside the segregated, controlled blending and rolling average models in ISO 22095:2020(E). The expansion from plastic food container products to all products making recycled content claims begins
January 1, 2030.
What that ISO citation actually is. ISO 22095-2:2026 was published in January 2026 and is titled “Chain of custody, Part 2: Requirements and guidelines for
mass balance.” Its clause 3.25 defines proportional attribution as the “assignment of credits to one or more outputs according to the proportion of the individual outputs with respect to the total output,” and clause 3.6 identifies the assignment of credits as the credit method, which clause 3.19 lists as one of the two implementation methods of the mass balance model. So the bill does not merely stop banning credit-based mass balance accounting. It permits it by name, using the ISO term for it. Two limits are worth noting: ISO also defines
non-proportional attribution at 3.20 and the bill does not permit that, and ISO published book and claim as a separate standard, Part 3, in the same month, which the bill does not cite. Book and claim, named in the introduced text, remains outside what AB 2253 allows. Source for the definitions:
ISO Online Browsing Platform, ISO 22095-2:2026 clause 3 (read August 16, 2026).
What this means for you: if you were preparing for California to ban mass balance recycled content claims, that is no longer what this bill does, and nothing in it takes effect before 2030. This corrects what we published on August 10 and in July. We verified it by running the legislature’s own Compare Versions tool against the June 25 and July 2 texts; the prohibition appears as deleted text in one and is absent from the other. Source:
California Legislature, AB 2253 Compare Versions (read August 16, 2026).