Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Heating Up: These are Permanent Regulations
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Heating Up
“What once was somewhat of a theoretical sustainability goal seems to have shifted into an active regulatory reality, with stakeholders often identifying issues with the various implementations.”
GUEST ARTICLE WRITTEN BY CARY SHERBURNE OF WHATTHEYTHINK
A key regulatory category related to sustainability is Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). It is an environmental policy approach that shifts the financial and physical responsibility of managing a product's end-of-life (including recycling, take-back, and disposal, as well as packaging) from taxpayers and municipalities onto the manufacturer or brand. Here we summarize some of the most recent actions in regard to EPR globally.
I’ve recently been seeing EPR with respect to packaging pop up more frequently in the many newsletters and information sources I subscribe to. It’s been a topic of discussion for some time, but regulatory implementations have been disparate and often slow to be actually adopted.
What once was somewhat of a theoretical sustainability goal seems to have shifted into an active regulatory reality, with stakeholders often identifying issues with the various implementations.
For example, in Europe, the Textile Pro Forum says an analysis showed significant differences in registration, reporting and invoicing standards for textile producers across the European continent.
Its research revealed that each country had adopted its own approach, leading to a fragmented regulatory landscape. This created somewhat of a compliance nightmare for cross-border and ecommerce operations. This research resulted in the EU’s blanket harmonization which takes effect in August, designed to resolve these conflicts.
In the U.S., there is no Federal EPR law, leaving the states to fend for themselves.
Seven states now enforce comprehensive packaging EPR laws: Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington. May 2026 marked the first simultaneous multi-state compliance deadline in history, forcing companies to report highly granular material data across state lines.
As one might expect, California officially has final rules in effect. Its Senate Bill 54 (the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act) extended producer responsibility regulations were approved and became effective on May 1, 2026. Producers must have registered within 30 days with the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, join the Circular Action Alliance (CAA), or applied as independent producers and submit or update 2023 baseline data used to set future fee rates and source reduction benchmarks.
These are permanent regulations. And it’s a major change for producers, especially for brands and packaging converters.
Oregon’s Recycling Modernization Act is in full active enforcement. The state has already begun publicly listing non-compliant producers and handing cases over to the Department of Environmental Quality.
In New York, you would expect similar outcomes, but its packaging reduction bill has been stalled for three years, leaving a huge gap in East Coast supply chain alignment, with states like New Jersey and Georgia introducing their own new bills, with no assurance that there is any collaboration or synergy from state to state.
It should be noted that the definition of a “producer” is not necessarily the factory that manufactures the product or packaging.
In reality, EPR regulations target the entity that has the most control over the packaging design or the entity that first introduces it to the local market. So even who is bound by these regulations can be confusing.
The upshot is that, in many regions, data tracking for packaging material composition and lifecycle are longer a corporate social responsibility, as it has been for many years. It is now a baseline legal requirement.
Europe has moved faster to ensure cross-border alignment; it’s a different story in the U.S., which is still quite fragmented, again, a compliance headache for brands, retailers, and packaging converters.
That being said, significant progress is being made and there is hope some of these issues will be resolved by the 2030 target date that many have set for ensuring a more sustainable packaging supply chain and life cycle.
About Cary Sherburne: Cary Sherburne is a well-known author, journalist and marketing consultant whose practice is focused on marketing communications strategies for the printing and publishing industries.
Cary Sherburne is available for speaking engagements and consulting projects. To get more information contact us. Please offer your feedback to Cary. She can be reached at cary@whattheythink.com.
