The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality announced it approved a program plan on Feb. 21. | Yanqiang Dai/Shutterstock
After several years of work, Oregon has approved an extended producer responsibility plan, laying out how packaging producers are expected to fulfill the requirements of the law.
Of the five states with packaging EPR laws, Oregon is the first to reach this milestone following the 2021 passage of its policy. The Department of Environmental Quality has been working with national producer responsibility organization Circular Action Alliance on implementation.
On Feb. 21, Oregon DEQ announced it approved CAA’s program plan with six ordered changes. Nicole Portley, the EPR program plan lead at Oregon DEQ, called the approval a significant milestone.
“DEQ and CAA are, in effect, on the same relay team,” she said. “We’ve been doing a lot of the execution up until now, and now we hand off the baton in many ways, and they’ll be doing much of the execution with us settling more into our oversight role.”
The producer plan is a vital part of Oregon’s shared EPR model, Portley said.
“We think we have a really strong plan, one of the most detailed and transparent that we’re aware of,” she said. “We’re very confident in CAAs ability to implement a robust program based on the work that we’ve seen in this runup. They’ve been steady and sophisticated in developing a plan and we feel really good about the result.”
Jeff Fielkow, CAA CEO, said in a statement that the approval “demonstrates the value of partnership with DEQ and input from organizations across the state.”
“By working together, we have developed a balanced framework that ensures producer compliance while delivering tangible improvements to Oregon’s recycling system,” he said. “We look forward to launching this transformative program in July.”
Changes come after three drafts, close engagement
The changes concern more clarity around the process that will fund all local governments’ eligible infrastructure, including trucks, containers, depots and reload facilities. In addition, there are amendments to the dispute resolution process.
“We want to be sure if there would be any statutory interpretations or rule interpretations that those would be handled effectively,” Portley said.
DEQ asked for some changes to convenience standards for the list of covered materials, though the PRO has until the end of 2027 to fully meet the standards.
“We didn’t expect a fully fleshed out plan in the program plan but wanted a commitment and process to get there,” she said. “There were some tweaks on that front.”
The fourth requested change was authorizing CAA to let DEQ take the lead on remote bale tracking for responsible end market obligations, which is a jointly assigned task under the law.
DEQ also asked for more detail on how CAA plans to evaluate whether material hierarchy goals, which specify that materials have to be managed to their “highest and best use,” are being met, Portley said.
Finally, DEQ requested minor technical tweaks in the financial section, mostly around the flat fee schedule and how the state adjustment factor could be temporarily applied to a single material that is being transitioned onto the statewide collection list. The change is meant to account for the fact that onramping a material could make the price temporarily higher than other, “environmentally unfavorable” methods.
Portley said over the course of three drafts, there have been substantive improvements and important lessons learned. Engaging with the PRO early is vital, she said, and the biggest takeaway for her was that the process showed how to effectively carry out a needs assessment.
“What are the questions you need to ask in order to have enough information to identify what the eligible costs are? Our first pass at that was insufficient,” she said. So CAA performed a second one – the Oregon Recycling System Optimization Project – to get the information it needed.
“We’re glad that everything was able to stay on track timing-wise, but when we roll around to the next needs assessment, it’s going to be more robust and informed by our experience,” she said.
What comes next?
With the plan approved, next comes rollout. The program officially starts on July 1, but Portley said it’s not a switch but rather a dial that will slowly turn up.
“Depending on where folks live in Oregon and the baseline they’re starting from, they’ll see changes sooner or later, more dramatic or less dramatic,” she said.
Communities have been sorted by priority level, and priority A communities – those who need investments in order to comply with the law – will see funding first.
There’s $3 million “slated to go out the door” in the third quarter of 2025, Portley said, and those are mainly for priority A communities. In addition, MRFs will start to see processor commodity risk fees and contamination management fees starting July 1.
“While we have a complete plan and it’s something to celebrate and sit upon a bit, it is also a living document,” Portley said. “It can be amended, and there are several amendments that CAA has foreshadowed in the plan.”
That includes moving several materials to the uniform statewide collection list that needed a little more time and investment to get to a responsible end market, she said. One example is PET thermoforms.
“We’ve drawn a bit of a line, where we want to see some investment in markets before we would give a green light to that material,” Portley said.
Any plan amendments would undergo both recycling council review and public comment.