California's Opportunity: Let Global Brands and the Plastic Industry Invest Fines in Proof, Not Punishment (NASDAQ: SMX)

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / October 6, 2025 / California never misses a chance to make a statement or a lawsuit. So when Los Angeles County went after Coca-Cola and PepsiCo for allegedly misleading consumers about plastic waste, the headlines practically wrote themselves. Two global icons, one sweeping accusation, and a familiar villain: plastic.

The optics were perfect. The outcome, less so. Unless they pay attention to opportunities that exist right here, right now, instead of acting as a purely punitive body.

What the state doesn't seem to realize is that the solution it's seeking already exists, and it isn't another fine. It's proof. It's infrastructure. It's SMX (NASDAQ:SMX), a company that has already built what Los Angeles County and global policymakers keep asking for. It delivers real, molecular-level substance to what decades of summits like COP 29 and the UN Plastics Treaty have only talked about.

For its part, SMX isn't talking; it's offering. Not about a piece of the puzzle, but the entire wish list: measurable traceability, proof that recycled content is genuine, assurance that waste streams are truly closed, and validation that sustainability is more than a talking point on a corporate slide. That's the frustrating part. While the debates drag on year after year in search of solutions, SMX already has them, making it long overdue to choose and implement real technology over recycled rhetoric. It's a straightforward process that lets SMX do the heavy lifting. Here's how it works.

SMX Immutably Marks Plastics at the Resin Stage

SMX's molecular-marker technology embeds invisible, tamper-proof identifiers directly into plastics at the resin stage, before they ever take shape. Every granule of resin carries a unique molecular fingerprint, creating an unbreakable chain of custody from creation to collection to recycling. That's not a proposal. That's a platform. And it's working today.

Thus, instead of forcing companies to pay fines for a lack of proof, California could be funding a system that guarantees it. Rather than punishing progress, it could accelerate it by using the dollars already flowing through its lawsuits to build infrastructure that makes compliance automatic.

Coke and Pepsi aren't the problem. Their intent has always been good, and their investments prove it. Both companies have invested significant resources in recycling innovation, recovery infrastructure, and sustainability initiatives across every major market worldwide. They've built partnerships, funded programs, and pledged real progress. What they're battling isn't a lack of effort. It's a lack of alignment.