A bill before the House Energy and Commerce Committee would make bookkeeping a lawful substitute for recycled fibre. H.R. 7502, introduced in February by Nick Langworthy with nine cosponsors from both parties, accepts mass balance accounting as substantiation for a recycled-content claim and declines to say how the accounting should be done. That omission is the contest: whoever writes the allocation rule decides which supply chains are already compliant and which must be rebuilt.

Twelve organisations wrote to the committee on 13 July urging passage. The signatories are Americans for Prosperity, the National Taxpayers Union, the Consumer Choice Center and nine bodies of similar description, assembled by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. Their stated grievance is that the FTC’s Green Guides have not been revised since 2012. Not one of them sorts a bale or spins a yarn. The definition of recycled is being drafted by parties with nothing to recycle.

The text is candid about the delegation. Mass balance is acceptable, section 3 says, if its use “complies with the requirements of a third-party certification system”. Such a system is defined, two pages earlier, as one that “establishes a set of rules governing the implementation of mass balance accounting approaches”. The single quantity Congress fixes is a ceiling — attributed content may not exceed the recovered material introduced, less process losses. Everything beneath that ceiling is a private matter.

Congress would create the standard and let the certified choose their certifier.

The objection being raised is the wrong one. Ocean Conservancy warns that the bill invites credit for plastics that were turned into fuel, as reported by Packaging Dive, and the drafters have already answered it: fuels sold as an end product may not be marketed as recycled content. Fuel was the argument they prepared for. Their other complaint, that mechanical recyclers already struggling to survive get nothing from the bill, goes unanswered. Allocation is the one they left open.

Brussels declined the same blank, for bottles at least. Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1425, adopted on 30 June, fixes the “fuel-use excluded” allocation rule, caps the accounting period at three months, and forbids attributed amounts from moving between facilities or companies. Each provision closes a route H.R. 7502 leaves open. The European rule was thirteen days old when the coalition wrote to congratulate Washington on supplying clarity.

In apparel the rule would land on a supply base with almost nothing to attribute. Recycled polyester held 12% of the polyester market in 2024 and 98% of it came from drinks bottles, with textile-to-textile recycling supplying under 1% of all fibre. Under a permissive certification system a producer may co-process a token stream of garment waste with virgin feedstock, then concentrate the recycled attribute onto the fraction it intends to sell as recycled. The molecules never move. The paperwork does.

The industry’s own body has noticed. American Circular Textiles, which sits in the Recycling Leadership Council beside the National Retail Federation, welcomed federal recognition of mass balance as something that “could help unlock investment and scale for recycled and alternative feedstocks”, then warned that “clear guidance around third-party verification will be critical for the textile industry”. The caveat names what the bill omits. An endorsement conditional on the missing half is not support. It is a requisition.

Section 6 would bar any state from maintaining a law relating to the bill’s prohibitions. Section 4 gives the Commission a year to align the Green Guides, then forbids it from resting an enforcement action on those guidelines. The national standard would therefore arrive as guidance that cannot be enforced as guidance, sitting on private rules nobody has yet written. Whichever methodology becomes the default will not have recycled a gram. It will own the word, which outlasts any plant.