AB 2253 came out of Senate Appropriations 5-2 on August 13, 2026, was read a second time and ordered to third reading on August 17, then on
August 21 was read a third time, amended on the floor, and ordered back to second reading. It sits on the Senate second reading file for August 24.
There has been no Senate floor vote. With the legislature adjourning around August 31 and a Senate-amended bill still needing Assembly concurrence, the remaining path is short.
The August 21 version continues not to ban credit-based mass balance; the July 2, 2026 amendment removed that, as we reported on August 16. What the current text does: expands PRC 42357.6 from plastic food container products to
all products making recycled content claims; pins the FTC Green Guides reference to those guides as they read on January 1, 2026; requires written documentation that the recycled content claimed does not exceed the amount of third-party certified recycled content introduced into the manufacturer’s or supplier’s overall supply stream for that product line; and requires those records to be furnished to the Attorney General on request for non-plastic-food-container products, with confidential and trade secret information staying confidential. Operative
January 1, 2030.
What this means for you: nothing changes today. If you make a recycled content claim in California, the thing to build toward is certified supply-stream documentation you can hand to the Attorney General, not a mass balance prohibition. One caution: at least one syndicated news story published on August 21 still describes AB 2253 as banning certain accounting methods used to establish recycled content. That describes the introduced bill, not the current one, and it is wrong. Source:
California Legislative Information, AB 2253 bill history (read August 23, 2026).