Webinar Recap

 

2026 was the first full reporting cycle for most US producers. Oregon and Colorado filed their second year, California, which is one of the largest economies in the world, reported for the first time (covering two years of data), and Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington came online with simplified pre-program reporting.

All of it landed on a single May 31 deadline in a harmonization attempt by CAA. There are seven states with packaging EPR obligations, three more in the needs-assessment phase (Illinois, Connecticut, Hawaii), and on any given day 10 to 12 more with EPR moving through the legislature. EPR for packaging in the US is no longer an if and a when, it’s here, and it’s now.

Check out our interactive map for a quick snapshot on where EPR is currently in the US.

A structural note that trips producers up: Oregon and Colorado report against 65 covered material categories; California uses 95, with extra requirements for plastics. Producer definitions also differ. Moreover, you can be obligated in Oregon and California (which include business-to-business packaging) but not in Colorado.

 

 

Five lessons from the first full reporting cycle

1. Classification matters. A small misclassification carries real financial consequences. Each covered-material category has its own fee, and the gap between PET (#1) and #5 plastics can be significant. Guessing what your package is made of is not a prudent path.
2. Data is everything. Incomplete or inconsistent bills of materials handicap the entire process. Clean, transparent packaging data is what makes accurate classification possible.
3. Sales data does not equal packaging data. Knowing what sold into a state isn’t the same as knowing the packaging used to sell it — and products moving through distribution centers often lose state-level visibility. Both gaps need closing.
4. Ownership matters. The most successful engagements pulled in sustainability, legal, finance, operations, and packaging engineering together. EPR rarely lives in one department.
5. Build once, use repeatedly. Set the data architecture up now — from SAP, Dynamics, or wherever the data originates — so each future year becomes a repeatable process rather than a rebuild.

 

 

California: From reporting to transformation

California pushed the conversation from “what did we sell and how do we report it” to “what are we going to do about it.” Its individual source reduction plan (ISRP) was due August 1, requiring producers to show how they’ll help the state hit its goal of 65% of plastic ACTUALLY recycled and not merely recyclable. Producers work across five reduction pathways, reaching back to a 2023 baseline (with credit available for reductions achieved earlier).

Between 12 and 18 packaging types on California’s list are flagged as unlikely to meet the recyclability definition at the current pace. Expect a bonus/malus eco-modulation scheme to become the primary enforcement lever ahead of the program’s 2032 milestone: rewards for sustainable packaging, and exponentially rising fees for materials that are difficult or impossible to recycle.

 

 

Maine: First to pass, last to implement

Maine was the first of the seven states to pass packaging EPR and will be the last to implement it.

Its program is structured differently: the administering body is a “stewardship organization,” not a PRO, and the model is more municipally driven, with non-mandatory participation. When the RFP for that organization went out, no proposals were submitted as of August 20. Circular Action Alliance the PRO for six of the seven state programs made a deliberate decision not to bid, stating the RFP as scoped wasn’t aligned with its operational, systems, and data-stewardship standards (this is important to note as the issue was not with the policy itself)

CAA left the door open should a future RFP align more closely. Maine still publicly targets registration and invoicing by end of 2026, though a reissued RFP looks more likely than that timeline holding.

 

 

Litigation: Oregon holds, and a labeling fight

On August 27, a federal court upheld Oregon’s Recycling Modernization Act, rejecting the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors’ challenge.

NAW has also filed in Colorado and California with the latter case adding 17 state attorneys general as plaintiffs. Separately, California’s SB 343 “Truth in Labeling” law drew a preliminary injunction; because it would force producers to strip recyclability claims and chasing-arrows symbols that are required as resin codes in 26 other states, it has triggered serious talk of a federal labeling standard in Congress.

 

 

Haven’t reported yet?

California woke a lot of producers up. If you haven’t filed, the prudent play is not to wait it out:

1. Confirm your obligation across all six CAA states — not just California.
2. Register and communicate with Circular Action Alliance so you’re not treated as recalcitrant. Expect a notice of delinquency shortly after, often with a 90-day clock.
3. Get to work on your data immediately so you can report inside that window.
4. Don’t underestimate non-compliance. Oregon fines run up to $25,000 per day; California up to $50,000 per day, per violation and ultimately, sales bans.
5. Don’t skip California’s one-time ISRP. New clients are bundling 2025 reporting, 2026 reporting, and the ISRP together for efficiency.

The bottom line: compliance data is becoming financial data. Full invoices are arriving from Oregon and Colorado, with fee increases already appearing for difficult-to-recycle categories, and California’s program fees will turn into full fees. Build EPR into your 2027–2028 budgets now.

 

 

Canada: Harmonized provincial reporting arrives

Good news with a catch. Starting report year 2027  (based on this year’s sales data) provinces are aligning on a single framework of 64 standardized material categories, including Quebec. The upside is consistency across provinces. The catch is granularity: many previously grouped materials are being disaggregated.

Paper laminates split into paperboard and paper; HDPE bottles into natural, coloured, and a catch-all; other plastic packaging pulls polypropylene out on its own; plastic laminates split polypropylene from PVC.

That means heavier reliance on supplier and bill-of-materials data to calculate the more detailed weights. Start reviewing your BOM weights now.

 

 

Canada: The Federal Plastics Registry (FPR)

Phase 1 – no pause, no delay. The three categories (packaging both filled and unfilled; single-use and disposable plastics; electrical and electronic equipment) are unchanged, covering primary and secondary packaging above a 1,000 kg threshold measured Canada-wide. Producers report full 2025 calendar-year data by September 29, 2026.

Phase 2 – a confirmed delay, not a scope reduction. This is a timing shift. ECCC is expected to publish guidance and a Canada Gazette notification (a Section 46 notice) this fall, likely combining Phase 2 and Phase 3 and bringing in resident manufacturers, pallet producers, plastic converters and compounders, and service providers, plus textiles and apparel.

Treat any specific Phase 2/3 dates as provisional until that guidance lands, and use the window to build the data foundation, not to wait.

 

 

Canada: PFAS – a new obligation

ECCC formally classified PFAS as a toxic class in 2025, and there are now two distinct obligations producers routinely confuse:

CEPA Section 71 — a one-time information-gathering exercise covering 312 PFAS substances, referencing 2023 calendar-year data, assessed company-wide. The deadline has passed, but many organizations are still submitting.

NPRI PFAS reporting — an annual, recurring obligation covering 163 individual substances, assessed facility-by-facility at a 1 kg threshold and 0.1% concentration. The first live reporting year’s deadline was June 1, 2026.

They carry different substance lists, scope, and timelines — completing one does not satisfy the other. The most common friction points are obtaining safety data sheets and CAS numbers from suppliers, and the fact that many suppliers don’t yet know whether PFAS is present in their products at all.

 

 

United States: Deposit return systems

Even producers who sell no beverages should watch DRS. Where a bottle bill exists, PET bottles are pulled out of the municipal waste stream — where none exists, they stay in it — which meaningfully changes the EPR cost picture for everyone else.

Ten states currently run bottle bills, and per Container Recycling Institute data, redemption rates are declining across all ten (no longer attributable to COVID). States including Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. are exploring new or modernized programs. DRS typically achieves higher return rates than EPR for the covered material, sometimes at higher cost and the two can coexist.

 

 

On the horizon: Textiles and the international picture

Textile EPR is likely the next major wave. California already has a textile EPR law with a PRO in place (registration due earlier this year, reporting next year), and France offers a long-running precedent.

Once synthetic plastics — polyester, nylon, acrylic — are added for functionality, textiles fall into plastics scope for FPR as well. For multinationals, there’s a real Venn-diagram overlap between California’s SB 54 and Europe’s PPWR; the same resin-level data can serve both, and cross-Atlantic engagements can be run as a single roadmap.

 

 

From compliance to strategy

The common thread across every segment: these obligations share more underlying data than they appear to. FPR, SB 54, DRS, and recycled-content reporting all draw on packaging data you can reuse.

Woven together, the redundant effort shrinks — and EPR shifts from a cost driver into a strategic initiative with defensible ROI. Our approach stays simple: evaluate, engage, execute — becoming a trusted extension of your team across US and Canadian reporting, fee mitigation, PRO selection, and packaging transformation.