Extended producer responsibility policies for all sorts of materials — packaging, paint, batteries, vapes — are riding a wave of momentum across the U.S. and are poised to continue expanding to more states, several industry leaders said at the 2025 Product Stewardship Forum outside of Chicago last week.
“EPR has arrived,” said Abby Boudouris, senior legislative analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, referring not only to that state’s anticipated implementation of EPR for packaging this summer but also to recent passage of similar policies in Maryland and Washington. Battery-focused EPR also passed in Colorado and Nebraska this spring.
The Product Stewardship Institute event also showed a recycling system grappling with a fragmented EPR landscape and still beset by long-running debates over the burden that the laws are, or aren’t, placing on manufacturers — and ultimately consumers.
“You probably think, ‘Don’t you know what your packaging is?'” Ken Brown, director of environmental health safety and sustainability for Illinois Tool Works, a Glenview based manufacturer, said during the event.
But the company has never had to compile and share data like it recently had to do for Oregon, he said, and EPR is one of many sustainability-related projects in progress: “There’s an awful lot going on in this space.”
Harmonization
EPR programs generally require the makers of packaging, batteries, household hazardous waste and other items to pay fees that support the recycling of their products and contribute to broader improvements, such as higher recycled-content minimums.
The approach is enjoying a growing profile, with more states adopting it in some form each year. Multiple companies and other organizations advocate on its behalf, including PSI, The Recycling Partnership, Ball Corporation and the Association of Plastic Recyclers, owner of Resource Recycling. A patchwork of EPR policies among almost two dozen material categories now stretches from coast to coast.
“We’ve called it producer responsibility because they (the producers) have been out of it, but we’re really talking about a network of accountability,” said Scott Cassel, PSI’s CEO and founder at the event. “We all have that responsibility.”
Each state has taken its own approach to the details, which has helped those laws pass in a variety of political contexts. It could also create problems, however, such as by complicating compliance for producers that operate across multiple jurisdictions or by diluting the effects of a given incentive if one state’s rule differs from another’s.
As a result, states are trying to learn from one another as their EPR moves from legislative text to reality, said Shannon McDonald, natural resource planner at the Maryland Department of the Environment, and other state officials during the forum. Going further, PSI announced that it’s launching a harmonization task force that will work to align fee structures and other provisions, though more information was not available by press time.
“The more we can harmonize, the more successful we’ll be,” said Zoe Heller, director of the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery.
In the meantime, several speakers said advocates for EPR should keep building on their success.
“Let’s get more states on board, particularly our neighbors,” said Tom Metzner, an analyst with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The state’s EPR laws cover tires, paint and mattresses, among other items.
Lingering discord
The consensus around EPR is not universal, with several forum panelists debating whether EPR fees and requirements will translate to higher prices at the grocery store.
“I’m here to debunk that,” said Gary Cohen, executive director of the nonprofit Tennessee Waste to Jobs. Packaging is a small fraction of the overall cost of an item on the shelf, he said, of which EPR fees would be another small fraction. “It’s not an automatic pass-through.”
In the following session, Michael Hoffman, president and CEO of the National Waste & Recycling Association, said mandated recycled content would do more for recycling than EPR — and that EPR does increase prices.
“This is a grocery tax,” he said.
It’s a yearslong dispute, drawn out by the fact that EPR for packaging and paper products specifically is still theoretical in the U.S. while a handful of states gradually roll out new rules.
On one hand, a 2020 RRS report for Oregon found no correlation between prices and the presence or absence of EPR in Canadian provinces, and a 2022 report from Columbia University found only a tiny increase in prices would follow EPR passage.
On the other, the NWRA and Eunomia in 2022 reported EPR programs had increased recycling rates but not recycled material usage in Europe, and a researcher at York University in Toronto has said EPR in New York would add hundreds of dollars to a family’s grocery bill each year.
“To be quite honest with you, that’s actually on the low end,” the researcher, Calvin Lakhan, said on The Business Council of New York State’s podcast in March. “I think this is something that is critically neglected in conversations surrounding EPR about who is actually impacted by this and what are we trying to achieve.”
Earlier this year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom cited costs to consumers and businesses when he rejected the draft regulations to the state’s packaging and paper EPR law, which sent regulators and proponents scrambling to adjust on the fly.
At the forum, Dylan de Thomas, TRP’s vice president of public policy and government affairs, dismissed Lakhan’s findings as “a literally made-up number,” adding, “You do not see these costs passed on in any meaningful way.”
Joachim Quoden, managing director of the Belgium-based Extended Producer Responsibility Alliance, added that the worries over EPR are misplaced. He and several other speakers emphasized that businesses and economies can benefit from the policies as well.
“I have a feeling that we are blamed because we give a price tag to the matter,” Quoden said, referring to the costs of recycling, litter and other issues that are already being paid by society at large. “Of course people are afraid if something new is coming.”
A version of this story appeared in Resource Recycling on June 10.
