The first major environmental bill to begin advancing in the 2026 legislative session seeks to prohibit companies making or using plastic pellets from discharging them into waters or other natural surroundings — but in ways that concern leaders of the plastics industry.

Plastic pellets are lentil-sized pieces of the material that are melted down by manufacturers to make everything from toys to kitchenware to computers. When these pellets fall off trains that are carrying them or get discharged from factories, they can end up in fields or streams and can be eaten by animals or ingested by humans via water, causing health problems and leaving waste that doesn’t biodegrade.

Senate Bill 16, sponsored by Democratic Sens. Lisa Cutter of Morrison and Katie Wallace of Longmont, would ban the Colorado Department of Health and Environment from issuing permits that allow the discharge of plastic pellets. It also would make the reckless and knowing discharge of plastic pellets without a permit a class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by criminal penalties, administrative fines of as much as $15,000 per violation and civil penalties of as much as $25,000 per violation.

“Very, very hard to clean up”

While backers did not cite specific spills or discharges in Colorado that led to this proposal, Colorado Coalition for a Livable Climate legislative analyst Jan Rose said that 230,000 metric tons of plastic nurdles end up in the environment worldwide annually. And Sara Carpenter, board chairwoman for Healthy Air and Water Colorado, emphasized that SB 16 is an upstream solution that is meant to stop the plastic pollution now happening in spurts in this state before it becomes an even bigger problem.

“This is a problem and worthy of a policy,” said Danny Katz, executive director of CoPIRG, the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. “These pellets, as it was said, are very small and light. Once they get out into our communities, they are very, very hard to clean up.”

Plastic-industry leaders did not disagree Wednesday in testimony to the Senate Transportation & Energy Committee with the need to contain pellets, pointing to their own initiative, Operation Clean Sweep, that seeks to prevent resin loss by members. But even as the committee voted 5-3 along Democrat-led party lines to advance the bill to the Senate floor, those industry leaders asked for changes that they said could make the bill less punitive and do less damage to Colorado’s ability to attract manufacturers to the state.

Could plastic regulation scare manufacturers from Colorado?

The requirements in SB 16 could cost the 2,100 permitted Colorado companies that handle plastic pellets some $2 million in compliance costs and will require CDPHE to spend $500,000 or more on field inspections and permit analysis to enforce the bill, warned Charlotte Dreizen, director of Operation Clean Sweep for the Plastics Industry Association. She suggested it would be better to replace the “damaging” penalties with industry best practices like mandatory employee education and with a third-party inspection program to ensure that manufacturers are using those practices.

The punitive nature of the bill, which doesn’t prescribe how companies can get rid of the plastic pellets so much as it penalizes haphazard discharge, also could hurt Colorado’s attempt to grow a circular economy around plastics, said Allison Chertack, an associate director with the American Chemistry Council. Officials will launch a statewide residential recycling program in June, and one aim is to attract facilities that will take the increased amount of recycled waste and sell to in-state packaging producers to boost their percentage of recycled materials — a goal that could be jeopardized if plastics makers avoid Colorado for fear of excessive regulation.

“It inadvertently could create a more unfriendly environment for (extended producer responsibility) to thrive,” Chertack said.

Advocates, however, said that the most important thing the bill can do is to prevent the negative impacts on health and on the environment that plastic pellets, often referred to as microplastics, can have.

What plastic pellets can do

Because of their ubiquity in the environment, microplastics are eaten by animals that then sicken, and they also can break down further into nano-plastics that can enter the human body through air or water ingestion, Carpenter told the committee. Consumption can lead to reproductive-health problems and increase the occurrence of cancer, and they can act like magnets for pesticides or heavy metals and increase their pollution, said Rachel Jaeger, a campaign associate for Environment Colorado.

Federal law already bans discharge of plastic pellets into waterways without a permit, and SB 16 would ensure that Colorado cannot allow such a practice by outlawing such permits, Katz emphasized. Manufacturers then would have to find ways to dispose of them that wouldn’t permit them to sink into soil or water, he said.

Sen. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, said he worried that the bill creates a new criminal penalty at the same time that criminal-justice-reform advocates are pushing for less such actions, and he also expressed concern with the costs of CDPHE enforcing the new law.

More environmental regulations to come

Katz responded, however, that SB 16 doesn’t create a new penalty so much as it adds plastic pellets to the section of law that already bans illegal discharge of certain chemicals and toxins. And he pushed back against Dreizen’s claims of costly enforcement needs by saying the bill simply bans CDPHE from issuing these permits, which shouldn’t raise costs.

Sponsors made several changes at the request of plastics-industry leaders Wednesday, including delaying proposed implementation of the bill by a year from August 2026 to August 2027 and by exempting wastewater-treatment facilities from penalties. But all three Republicans on the committee still voted against the measure, extending to the Senate floor the debate over whether the law is a solution to an existing problem or a solution in search of a problem.

While SB 16 is focused on a specific product made by a specific industry, it looms as the first of many bills once again this year that will leave business and environmental leaders debating which regulations are helpful and which are excessive or infeasible. Legislators are expected to introduce bills to require producers of air pollution to list their emissions levels on their company websites and to enact plans for utilities to cut emissions further after hitting 80% reduction goals by 2030, among other ideas.