Inside the Circle: What the rainforest can teach us about EPR

Inside the Circle is a monthly column on circular economy trends transforming source reduction and recycling.

As producers rushed to submit reports by the May 31 deadline for California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington’s packaging EPR laws—despite pending lawsuits and uncertainty on all fronts—I consistently heard concerns about EPR’s implementation and impact.

Most people imagine public policy as a straight line: Pass a law → Write the rules → Fix the problem → Celebrate. If only! Real change looks more like untangling Christmas lights while riding a bicycle through a hurricane.

To reduce waste in packaging, for example, we have to think about consumers, retailers, brands, packaging manufacturers, recyclers, logistics firms, resin producers, waste haulers, chemical companies, environmental groups, lawmakers, regulators and innovators who haven’t even started their companies yet. Each influences the others. Push too hard in one place and costs explode somewhere else. Ban one material and a worse substitute often rushes in wearing a halo. Overregulate innovation and you accidentally protect incumbents.

This is why I’ve spent years studying nature. And not from behind a desk. Years ago, I wandered through forests in Latin America and Asia trying to resolve battles between environmentalists and timber companies. I thought I was going there to learn how to save rainforests. Instead, I learned how rainforests might save us.

At first glance, a jungle looks like total chaos. Everything competing. Everything consuming. Everything trying not to be eaten. A lot like cable news. But mature rainforests are something else entirely. They are astonishingly cooperative systems. Thousands of species occupy tiny niches. Waste from one becomes food for another. Large species create platforms for smaller ones. Competition still exists—but over time, ecosystems that survive evolve toward interdependence. Toward resilience. Toward creativity. Toward abundance.

Our industrial economy often behaves like an immature jungle. Workers versus management. Environmentalists versus corporations. Republicans versus Democrats. Consumers versus producers. Everybody yelling. Everybody fundraising. Everybody exhausted. Meanwhile, the underlying system keeps producing waste, pollution, loneliness, fragility and political rage.

What if instead of trying to make our jungle consume 3% less each year, we grew something more like a rainforest? An economy made up of tens of thousands of local enterprises connected to larger global companies. Enough diversity to innovate constantly. Enough permeability for new entrants. Enough resilience to survive shocks. Enough creativity to avoid becoming the economic equivalent of a monocrop field that collapses when drought, fire, flood, disease or climate disruption hits.

That brings me to packaging EPR. California Senate Bill 54 and similar laws in six other states are likely to cost businesses—and ultimately consumers—something like $60 billion to $100 billion over the next decade. And that’s just the opening act. Forty-three more states may follow.

Then come textiles. Batteries. Electronics. Light bulbs. Appliances. And plenty more opportunities for us to spend huge sums of money while changing far too little.

Don’t get me wrong. I support EPR. Putting a price on pollution is one of the most effective tools ever invented. But implementation matters. A lot. After ten years and $100 billion, plastic pollution in oceans, landfills, ecosystems—and frankly, our bloodstream—should be dramatically lower. That should be the standard.

And let’s be honest: There is a very real chance we spend that entire $100 billion and wake up ten years from now with the same plastic in the ocean, the same microplastics in our bodies, and more expensive groceries. That would be an unfortunate outcome.

The problem is that most EPR conversations obsess over recycling. I love recycling. I helped write California’s original bottle bill. I’m proud that it has helped recover hundreds of billions of containers. But recycling alone will not save us. Recycling is a means, not an end. The goal is not to recycle more stuff. The goal is to reduce the extraction of natural resources, lessen pollution and waste, and help human societies live within the limits of the living systems that sustain us.

Most of EPR’s biggest long-term benefits will come from source reduction, also known as waste prevention because it is the practice of reducing material use and stopping excess waste upstream. Source reduction means getting more with less. More value, service, convenience, prosperity, and quality of life while using less material, energy, packaging, and pollution, and creating less waste.

Not only does California’s Senate Bill 54 include mandates to responsibly dispose of packaging, but it also includes mandates to reduce packaging volumes at the source. Source reduction can be an exercise in smart design. Smarter products, packages, and systems that can meet people’s needs better while reducing economic and environmental costs.

Source reduction happens when:

We avoid locking out or locking in incumbent technologies.
We reward innovators whose ideas may cost more today but dramatically less tomorrow.
We avoid pushing manufacturing offshore to places with weaker environmental protections.
We stop pretending blunt bans are always elegant policy tools.
We create incentives that reward continuous efficiency gains across entire systems.
And, most importantly, we stop defining innovation too narrowly.

The biggest breakthroughs may come from places we aren’t even watching yet: