Where packaging EPR came from, and why the US adopted it

The short answer

Where it started: Germany, 1991

In the late 1980s West Germany was running out of landfill space, and packaging was the fastest-growing part of the waste stream. The government's answer, the 1991 Packaging Ordinance, was the first law anywhere to make manufacturers and retailers responsible for taking back and recycling the packaging they sold.

Industry's response became the template for everything that followed. Rather than each company collecting its own boxes and bottles, about 600 producers founded a shared non-profit, Der Grüne Punkt (the Green Dot), in September 1990. It ran a second, parallel collection system for packaging, funded by fees that each producer paid per package it put on the market.¹ That structure, a producer-funded organization running collection on behalf of its members, is what every US state program copies today. The Green Dot symbol itself spread across Europe as the mark of a producer who had paid in.

Three ideas from the German system still define packaging EPR:

• The polluter pays. The cost of dealing with packaging sits with whoever chose the packaging, which gives them a reason to choose less of it and better kinds of it.
• A shared organization, not individual take-back. One body collects fees, runs or funds collection, and reports to the regulator.
• Fees by material. Charging more for packaging that is harder to recycle, which later became known as eco-modulation.

Europe makes it mandatory

The European Union adopted the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive in 1994, requiring every member state to set up producer-funded recovery and recycling of packaging. Over the following decade, national producer responsibility organizations appeared across Europe, each a local version of the Green Dot model.

The direction of travel has been one way. In 2025 the EU replaced the 1994 directive with a stricter regulation that requires all packaging to be recyclable by 2030, sets minimum recycled content, and mandates deposit systems for bottles and cans.⁵ The British Standards Institution counts more than 70 countries with EPR for one or more product categories, about 40 of them in Europe.² For a US brand that exports, packaging fees are already a familiar line item; for one that sells only at home, they are new.

Canada brings it to North America

The US did not get packaging EPR from Europe directly. It got it from Canada, where provinces had been moving producers toward full responsibility for residential recycling since the early 2000s.

The turning point was British Columbia. In May 2014, Recycle BC launched what it describes as the first full producer-responsibility program for packaging and paper in North America: producers, through a non-profit funded by more than 1,200 businesses, took over the cost and management of residential recycling across the province.³ Ontario followed with a longer transition of its Blue Box program to full producer responsibility, which began in 2023 and was completed in January 2026.⁶

British Columbia mattered because it was close, English-speaking, and demonstrably working. When Oregon's legislators wrote their law in 2021, the BC program was the model, and the same producer organization structure, now called a PRO, was adopted almost unchanged.

Why the United States held out

For two decades after Germany, the US had little reason to change. Landfill was cheap and plentiful in most of the country. Cities funded curbside recycling out of property taxes and, from the 2000s on, offset much of the cost by selling the collected material. Industry groups argued, successfully, that producer fees were a tax on consumers.

Underneath, the system depended on one customer. By the mid-2010s roughly 40% of US recyclables were being shipped to China, where low-cost sorting and manufacturing demand made even contaminated mixed bales worth buying.⁴ American recycling worked because somebody else was doing the hard part.

2018: National Sword

In January 2018, China's National Sword policy banned imports of most mixed recyclables and set a contamination limit of 0.5%, a standard almost no US facility could meet. The effect was immediate. Exports of US scrap plastic to China fell 92% in the first five months of the year.⁷ Bales that had been sold for revenue now had to be paid to be taken away, stockpiled, or landfilled.

Cities felt it first. San Diego went from earning about $4 million a year on its recycling to projecting a cost of $1.1 million a year.⁷ Hundreds of municipalities raised fees, cut the materials they accepted, or suspended programs. The National League of Cities' guidance to its members from this period is titled "Rethinking recycling."⁴

At the same time the national numbers became hard to defend. The EPA's last full estimate put the US plastics recycling rate at 8.7% in 2018.⁸ Independent estimates for 2021 were 5–6%.⁹ Packaging is the largest share of that plastic. For state legislators, the question changed from "should producers pay?" to "who else can?"

Industry changes sides

The other thing that changed after 2018 was the position of the largest consumer brands. For years they had opposed packaging fees. Once producer responsibility looked inevitable in several states, the calculation flipped: a company that helps write the rules gets a system it can live with, while one that keeps fighting gets whatever passes.

The Recycling Partnership, a non-profit funded by more than 80 consumer companies, moved from opposing EPR to publishing a model policy and supporting state bills.¹⁰ And when the first states needed a producer organization to run their programs, the biggest brands founded one. Circular Action Alliance, now the PRO in six of the seven states, was created by a group of large food, beverage, consumer goods and retail companies.¹¹ The system the US ended up with was designed, in large part, by the companies that pay into it.

Seven states in four years

Maine signed the first US packaging EPR law in July 2021, and Oregon followed within weeks.^12,13 Each law since has been written closer to the ones before it, because producers, state agencies and the PRO all want the same categories, deadlines and definitions from state to state.

Fee start dates are the first year producers are invoiced. Maine's program depends on the state hiring an operator, which it has not yet done.

The money is already large. Oregon's producer fees were budgeted at $226–292 million for 2025, Colorado's at about $300 million for 2027, and California's draft plan at $1.3–1.9 billion for 2027, all paid by producers. One consulting estimate puts Oregon's collections at more than $700 million in the program's first two and a half years.¹⁴

What comes next

No new state law passed in 2026, but the pipeline is long. New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Georgia all had active bills, and Hawaii, Rhode Island, Illinois, Massachusetts and Connecticut have passed needs-assessment laws, the study step that preceded every enacted program so far.^13,15

The pattern from thirty-five years of EPR elsewhere is consistent: programs start with fees, then add design rules, then tighten both. The EU's 2025 regulation is the latest example.⁵ California's 2032 source-reduction and recyclability requirements are the first of that kind in the US, and they are unlikely to be the last.

What it means for a brand today

A consumer brand or importer selling nationally is almost certainly a producer in Oregon and Colorado today, in California from 2027, and in the remaining states as they come online. The fee depends on the weight and material of every piece of packaging sold into each state, which means the practical work is collecting that data from suppliers and keeping it current.

Two guides cover the mechanics: Are you the producer? explains who the obligation lands on, and How EPR fees are calculated walks through the rates with a worked example. The state guides have each program's rules, deadlines and penalties.

Related guides

Sources

1. Der Grüne Punkt, “About us” (dual system founded 1990; collection from 1991). gruener-punkt.de
2. BSI, “Extended producer responsibility around the world”. bsigroup.com
3. Recycle BC, program launch (May 2014). recyclebc.ca
4. National League of Cities, “Rethinking recycling: how cities can adapt to evolving markets”. nlc.org
5. Baker McKenzie, “EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation” (Regulation (EU) 2025/40). bakermckenzie.com
6. Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority (Ontario), Blue Box transition. rpra.ca
7. NBC New York / AP, “US struggles with what to do with tons of recycled material” (2018). nbcnewyork.com
8. US EPA, Plastics: material-specific data. epa.gov
9. Grist, “The US only recycled about 5% of plastic waste last year” (2022). grist.org
10. The Recycling Partnership, Policy toolkit. recyclingpartnership.org
11. Circular Action Alliance, Registration and producer resources. circularactionalliance.org
12. Beveridge & Diamond, “Maine becomes first state to sign EPR law for packaging” (July 2021). bdlaw.com
13. National Conference of State Legislatures, Extended producer responsibility. ncsl.org
14. L.E.K. Consulting, “The EPR inflection point” (July 2026). PDF
15. Sustainable Packaging Coalition, Packaging policy news (June 2026). sustainablepackaging.org

What changed

• October 8, 2026 First published.

General information, not legal advice. This guide summarizes laws, rules and program documents as we read them on the review date above. These programs change often, and how a law applies depends on your products, contracts and facts. For a formal opinion, consult counsel. Producer Desk is not a law firm.