21 States, 34 Bills, 2 Laws: What Advanced Recycling State Laws Changed Since 2024

The bill for getting this wrong arrives as an applicability determination. A plastics-to-fuel developer holds a state permit issued under a manufacturing statute, has feedstock contracted and a reactor on order, and then hears from the air agency that the unit still reads as a municipal waste combustion unit under 40 CFR Part 60. That means a Clean Air Act permit nobody budgeted, a control device nobody specified, and a commissioning date that slides past the offtake. Advanced recycling state laws get sold as the cure for precisely this situation, and they don't cure it. What they do change is narrower, worth real money in one respect, and useless where projects usually lose.

Four claims come up over and over, from clients, their counsel, and the occasional investment committee. I'll take them in the order they tend to cause damage.

"Twenty-five states have exempted advanced recycling from waste regulation"

The number is defensible as a count of statutes. It traces to the chemical industry's own tally of laws it helped draft [industry count]. As a description of what a pyrolysis manufacturing exemption buys you, it's badly misleading.

Twenty-one states have considered thirty-four advanced recycling bills since 2024, according to MultiState's legislative tracking, and exactly two enacted anything: Maine and California. Maine did the conventional thing twice, in 2024 and again this past April. California went the other direction entirely. Its AB 70, signed in October 2025, kept pyrolysis inside the state's existing solid waste law and declined to call the process recycling, which makes it the most consequential piece of chemical recycling legislation in three years and the one least likely to appear in a vendor deck.

The exemption bills that would do what developers assume is already done mostly died in committee. Maryland's HB 796, New York's S6371 and Pennsylvania's HB 1035 all failed to advance, per the same tally.

North Carolina's HB 605 cleared the House in 2025 and then stalled in the Senate, according to that review. That's the median outcome for this class of bill.

So what do the enacted statutes buy? Mostly a chapter reassignment in the state code, and in states that levy per-ton disposal surcharges it's worth cash. Pennsylvania stacks a $2/ton recycling fee from Act 101 onto a combined state surcharge of $6.25/ton at municipal waste facilities, based on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's survey of state waste surcharges. A unit classified as manufacturing pays no disposal surcharge, because on paper it isn't disposing of anything (the residue still has to go somewhere, but the fee follows the classification). Run that against a hundred thousand tons a year of contracted feedstock and you have the line item that paid for the lobbying. I should qualify that: the saving only exists in states that charge a surcharge, and it's a fee question rather than a permitting one.

What advanced recycling state laws leave untouched is a longer list than what they move. Zoning. Host community agreements. Discharge permits. Environmental-justice screening will reshape US siting for these plants faster than any emissions limit does, and a chapter reassignment gives a county commission no less reason to refuse one. And the federal air classification, which is where the next claim goes wrong.

"Our state calls us a manufacturer, so the incineration rules don't apply"

The Clean Air Act doesn't read state code, and advanced recycling state laws were never drafted to make it. Whether a unit is a municipal waste combustion unit gets decided in the federal standards for solid waste incineration units, and EPA has had three chances to take pyrolysis out of that definition.

It passed on all three. The 2020 proposal to drop pyrolysis/combustion units from the definition was withdrawn on June 5, 2023 after significant adverse comment, according to the withdrawal notice, with EPA saying it needed more time and staff to understand the process well enough to act. When the agency finalized its review of the Other Solid Waste Incineration standards on June 30, 2025, per the preamble to that rule, it said it would take no further action on pyrolysis units, which left them inside the definition the 2005 rule had written.

That same final rule tightened particulate standards for units burning ten tons a day or less and left standards above that threshold alone, according to the Federal Register notice. New source requirements took effect December 29, 2025. Existing units get three years from EPA's approval of their state plan, or July 1, 2030, whichever comes first, per the published compliance schedule. The same dynamic runs through the large municipal waste combustor state plan timeline: the clock you're on belongs to your state agency, not to Washington.

I'd rather be boring about this than clever, because I've been on the wrong end of it. In 2023 I filed a Title V modification that the client and I both read as minor, on the strength of a state classification that looked settled. It tripped prevention-of-significant-deterioration review and delayed startup by eight months. The state paperwork was correct. The federal applicability analysis underneath it had never been done, because everyone in the room assumed the state classification had already done it.

"The March 2026 EPA proposal settles the federal question"

It doesn't propose anything. The notice EPA published on March 20, 2026 is really about air curtain incinerators burning wood waste, yard waste and clean lumber, with some tidying of the commercial and industrial incinerator rules attached. Inside it, the agency solicits comment on revising the definition of municipal waste combustion unit to remove the reference to pyrolysis units. A hearing came and went in April; comments closed in May.

Soliciting comment is not proposing regulatory text. A definitional change that deregulates an entire technology class, carried inside a housekeeping rule about yard-waste burners, invites a petition for review that it loses on notice grounds. I'd put money on that, and I say it as someone who would like the question answered.

But there's a more interesting problem with the proposed fix, which is that the phrase everybody is fighting about doesn't describe current equipment. EPA's 2005 preamble spelled out what it had in mind:

pyrolysis/combustion units (two chamber incinerators with a starved air primary chamber followed by an afterburner to complete combustion)

That's a two-chamber starved-air incinerator with an afterburner on the back, and nobody is building one. License one of the continuous pyrolysis systems now on the market, Honeywell's among them, and you get a reactor feeding a condensation train, a hydrotreater, and a thermal oxidizer on the non-condensable gas (the train varies by licensor, and so does which piece triggers review). Strike the phrase and your reactor stops being named in the definition. Your thermal oxidizer is still a combustion source, your flare is still a flare, and the Title V arithmetic deciding whether you're a major source was being driven mostly by those two devices in the first place. Several developers I've spoken with this year are waiting on this rulemaking as though it unblocks their permit; for most of them it changes one input in a calculation with four.

"If the state says manufacturing, our output counts as recycling"

Separate statute, separate definition. This is the claim that shows up in diligence, and the first one I'd flag in a lender's question list. A packaging stewardship program, a recycled-content mandate and a corporate landfill diversion target each define recycling in their own terms, and none of them inherits a classification written into the solid waste chapter. Maine runs both an advanced recycling statute and a packaging stewardship program; being a manufacturer under the first earns nothing under the second.

The line that matters in those definitions is product versus fuel. Pyrolysis oil hydrotreated back into polymer feedstock has a credible argument for counting as recycling. The same oil sold as refinery blendstock or marine fuel generally doesn't, and a plastics-to-fuel state law that calls you a manufacturer doesn't shift that arithmetic. So if your financial model books the barrel as fuel while your sustainability reporting books the molecule as packaging, those two documents will meet each other in a data room. I've watched that collision take out a recycled-content premium a project's returns depended on, and the statute everyone relied on had nothing to say about it.

Some limits on all of the above. A unit under ten tons a day sits in a different corner of the federal rule than a commercial-scale train, and the applicability analysis differs. In states without delegation of the relevant program you deal with an EPA region directly, which changes who you persuade more than what you prove. Feedstock does more work than classification ever will: a chlorinated or PFAS-bearing stream can pull you toward RCRA no matter which chapter your permit sits in, and a plant taking mixed municipal waste rather than sorted post-industrial bales is a different regulatory animal with the same reactor inside it. Roughly a third of states have no advanced recycling statute, and there state pyrolysis permitting collapses back to how the solid waste program reads its own definition of processing. For anyone weighing landfill diversion routes against a conversion build, get that read in writing early.

Which leaves the thing I can't answer for anybody. EPA could draw the product-versus-fuel line in a definitional rulemaking and probably won't, because the air rules don't care what the molecule eventually becomes. State regulators writing recycled-content rules are drawing it themselves, on their own schedules, in incompatible ways. A court may get there before either of them. Meanwhile plants are being permitted, financed and built against an assumption nobody has tested in an adversarial setting, and some of those waste-to-energy projects will still be answering for it at their first renewal. So who draws that line, and when somebody finally does, will a state manufacturing classification carry any weight at all?

Sources & Notes

• Bill counts, the two enactments since 2024 and the failed exemption bills: MultiState's 2024-2026 advanced recycling overview. The widely quoted twenty-five-state figure is an industry tally of statutes, not a count of issued permits.
• EPA left pyrolysis units inside the municipal waste combustion unit definition in the Other Solid Waste Incineration final rule. The earlier proposal was pulled in the withdrawal notice, which also discusses the preamble language above.
• The current solicitation rides inside the air curtain incinerator proposal at 91 FR 13543, docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0068.
• Compliance dates come from Sidley's review of the final rule. Check your state plan status first.
• Pennsylvania's per-ton surcharges: the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's survey of state waste surcharges. Fee structures move with the legislative session; confirm the current rate with the agency.

Disclosure: I advise waste-to-energy developers on permitting and regulatory strategy, and write here for Renewable Waste Energy.