California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act.

(1) Existing law, the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act, requires a distributor to pay a redemption payment for every beverage container sold or offered for sale in the state. The act requires the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery to annually designate convenience zones, as defined, statewide, and requires at least one certified recycling center or location within every convenience zone that accepts all types of empty beverage containers and pays the refund value, if any, at one location, and that is open for business 30 hours per week. This bill would exempt from the requirement that each convenience zone be served by at least one certified recycling center a convenience zone that was served by, or exempted because of, a recycling center that closed between January 1, 2016, and March 31, 2016, inclusive, or that closed as a result of an action taken by the department on or after July 1, 2016. (2) Under the act, the department is required to calculate a processing fee for each beverage container with a specified scrap value, which is required to be paid by beverage manufacturers for each beverage container sold or transferred to a distributor or dealer. The department is required to calculate the processing fee in a specified manner, so that the actual processing fee generally equals 65% of the processing payment that the department is required to pay to processors if the scrap value of the container having a refund value pursuant to the act is less than the cost of recycling. The department is required to establish a processing fee account in the continuously appropriated California Beverage Container Recycling Fund for each material type and to deposit processing fees and other amounts in the applicable account. This bill would, for purposes of calculating processing payments on and after July 1, 2016, require the department, until April 1, 2017, to use the actual cost of recycling that was in effect on December 30, 2015, to calculate processing fees. The bill would make an appropriation by changing the terms and conditions under which the department is authorized to make payments from a continuously appropriated fund. The bill would provide that the processing fees shall not be higher than they would be absent these provisions. Existing law authorizes the department to reduce, subject to the availability of funds, the processing fee based on the recycling rate of the container by expending funds deposited in the processing fee account for that material type, in accordance with a specified formula. This bill would provide a definition for the phrase, "subject to the availability of funds," and state that definition is declaratory of existing law. The bill would prohibit the department, until April 1, 2017, from finding that funds are unavailable for purposes of that processing fee reduction. Existing law authorizes the department to adjust the processing payment upon making specified determinations with regard to, among other things, the statewide scrap value for the most recent available 12-month period and the amount of funds in the processing fee account. This bill would instead require, for purposes of adjusting the processing payment, use of the statewide scrap value as determined for the most recent available 3-month period. (3) The act continuously appropriates to the department the amount necessary to pay handling fees to provide an incentive for the redemption of empty beverage containers in convenience zones. Existing law specifies procedures for determining the number of containers for which a handling fee may be paid and requires the department to set the amount of the handling fee using a specified method, but formerly required the per-container handling fee to be set until March 1, 2013, at an amount not less than the amount of the per-container handling fee that was in effect on July 1, 2011. This bill would require the per-container handling fee to be set until April 1, 2017, at an amount that is not less than the amount of the per-container handling fee that was in effect on July 1, 2015. The bill would authorize the department to expend, once the per-container handling fee is funded, up to $3,000,000 for the 2016–17 fiscal year for supplemental incentive handling fee payments to low-volume recycling centers. The bill would make an appropriation by changing the terms and conditions under which the department is authorized to make payments from a continuously appropriated fund. (4) After setting aside funds for the payment of refund values and administrative fees, and for a reserve for contingencies, existing law continuously appropriates the remaining moneys in the fund to the department for expenditure for designated programs, grants, and fee payments, including, but not limited to, the processing fees and payments specified in (2) and the handling fees specified in (3) . This bill would make inoperative on April 1, 2017, the continuous appropriations of the remaining moneys in the fund, and related provisions. (5) This bill would declare that it is to take effect immediately as a bill providing for appropriations related to the Budget Bill.