California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1817 into regulation, including to the rising checklist of state laws limiting using PFAS substances in quite a lot of shopper merchandise.
As of January 1, 2025, AB 1817 prohibits the manufacture, distribution, sale, or supply 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 kind typically and ordinarily utilized in households and companies, and embody, however are usually not restricted to, attire, equipment, purses, backpacks, draperies, bathe curtains, furnishings, upholstery, beddings, towels, napkins, and tablecloths.”
The regulation exempts:
- PPE or clothes gadgets for unique use by the US navy
- Carpets and rugs, and carpet and rug therapies (as these are already regulated below the California Safer Shopper Merchandise regulation)
- Autos and car parts, together with plane
- Boats and vessels, together with covers
- Sure chemical, pharma, and environmental applied sciences
- Stadium shades and architectural material buildings
It additionally incorporates a carve out for “outside attire for extreme moist situations,” pushing the compliance date to January 1, 2028. However as of January 1, 2025, these merchandise should be labeled with a “legible and simply discernable disclosure” stating “Made with PFAS chemical substances.”
The regulation applies to all “regulated” PFAS substances, that are outlined as PFAS substances which are “deliberately added to a product and which have a useful or technical impact,” together with PFAS which are intentional breakdown merchandise of an added chemical with a useful or technical impact.
Enforcement
AB 1817 doesn’t include an unbiased enforcement scheme, reminiscent of 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 count on public enforcers (the California Legal professional Basic 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 reduction. The Legal professional Basic and district attorneys have a monitor report of working collectively to implement environmental legal guidelines within the state.
Non-public plaintiffs might also search to implement AB 1817 via the UCL and the Shopper Authorized Cures Act (CLRA), usually via shopper class actions. The overall construction of claims may very well 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 below these theories usually search damages (solely below the CLRA), restitution, injunction, and attorneys’ charges.
