California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1817 into legislation, including to the rising record of state laws proscribing using PFAS substances in quite a lot of shopper merchandise.
As of January 1, 2025, AB 1817 prohibits the manufacture, distribution, sale, or provide on the market within the state of “any new, not beforehand used, textile articles that include regulated” PFAS substances.
Scope
AB 1817 defines “textiles articles” as “textile items of a sort typically and ordinarily utilized in households and companies, and embody, however will not be restricted to, attire, equipment, purses, backpacks, draperies, bathe curtains, furnishings, upholstery, beddings, towels, napkins, and tablecloths.”
The legislation exempts:
- PPE or clothes objects for unique use by the US army
- Carpets and rugs, and carpet and rug remedies (as these are already regulated beneath the California Safer Client Merchandise regulation)
- Autos and car elements, together with plane
- Boats and vessels, together with covers
- Sure chemical, pharma, and environmental applied sciences
- Stadium shades and architectural cloth buildings
It additionally accommodates a carve out for “out of doors attire for extreme moist situations,” pushing the compliance date to January 1, 2028. However as of January 1, 2025, these merchandise have to be labeled with a “legible and simply discernable disclosure” stating “Made with PFAS chemical compounds.”
The legislation applies to all “regulated” PFAS substances, that are outlined as PFAS substances which can be “deliberately added to a product and which have a useful or technical impact,” together with PFAS which can be intentional breakdown merchandise of an added chemical with a useful or technical impact.
Enforcement
AB 1817 doesn’t include an unbiased enforcement scheme, corresponding to civil or legal penalties, and it doesn’t authorize a state company to promulgate implementing rules (which frequently embody administrative enforcement provisions).
Within the absence of particular enforcement provisions, we’d anticipate public enforcers (the California Lawyer Common and district or metropolis attorneys) to implement AB 1817 via California’s Unfair Competitors Regulation (UCL). Public enforcers can search civil penalties of as much as $2,500 per violation and injunctive aid. The Lawyer Common and district attorneys have a observe report of working collectively to implement environmental legal guidelines within the state.
Non-public plaintiffs may additionally search to implement AB 1817 via the UCL and the Client Authorized Cures Act (CLRA), usually via shopper class actions. The final construction of claims might be that buyers wouldn’t have paid what they did had they recognized the product contained PFAS; that the merchandise are unsafe as a result of they include PFAS; or, within the occasion a vendor makes sustainability claims in reference to merchandise, such claims are false as a result of the merchandise include PFAS. Class actions introduced beneath these theories usually search damages (solely beneath the CLRA), restitution, injunction, and attorneys’ charges.
