In a wide-ranging Q&A with Waste360, Alyssa Dizon, head of product at rePurpose Global, walks through where brands are actually getting stuck on SB 54: scattered packaging data with no single source of truth, the real upfront work of mapping proposed changes to California's five approved reduction pathways, and the risk of underestimating the law's full financial picture before committing to a packaging change. Dizon also breaks down some of the most consequential misconceptions she sees, from the false belief that the 25% reduction target applies to each individual producer, to brands weighting plastic mass while overlooking component count, to assuming a plastic-to-plastic swap like bottles to pouches automatically earns pathway credit.
The conversation goes beyond the Aug. 1 filing to the multi-year picture: how California's layered fee structure (base EPR fees, a reuse investment fee, and a bonus-malus system) rewards brands that model financial impact before tooling decisions are locked in, why treating packaging data as a single authoritative source lets a brand absorb regulatory revisions without re-collecting data from scratch, and why California's requirements are increasingly functioning as the de facto national packaging standard as more states adopt their own EPR programs. Dizon closes by framing a clean compliance data set as an asset that also strengthens Scope 3 reporting, retailer requests, and substantiated sustainability claims.
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