The first consolidated reporting deadline for extended producer responsibility packaging programs just passed, but that doesn’t mean the work is over. In many ways it’s just beginning — and opportunities to improve abound, according to compliance experts.
Now, focus shifts to implementation and putting the data to work, said Michael Wasserman, a senior consultant at Eunomia. Companies should prioritize the upstream factors such as redesigning packaging to be more recyclable, lightweight, or moving to a reuse and refill system, he said. With organized data, “there’s really a lot you can do.”
Seven U.S. states have passed packaging EPR laws in the last five years: California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington. Of those, Circular Action Alliance has already been selected as the producer responsibility organization in six.
With that level of activity and calls for harmonization, CAA announced a common deadline for reporting baseline data this year: May 31.
But just because the date was the same doesn’t mean that producers could submit the same report in each state. Each program is slightly different, with some asking for a more detailed breakdown of material by component, and some programs covering different kinds of packaging entirely.
Michael Washburn, founder of Washburn Consulting, noted that while having the reports due on the same day created predictability, the reports themselves differed. Additionally, even though the versions of the reports due in Minnesota and Maryland were considered “simplified,” due to those states being farther out from launching their programs, those “are not to be confused with simple.”
“They still have a tremendous amount of complexity if you’re doing it right,” Washburn added.
Compliance levels vary
Obligated companies were all over the map with preparedness for the joint deadline, said Cheryl Baldwin, Pure Strategies vice president of sustainability consulting and marketing.
“There’s companies that have been watching this since the beginning and have been gathering information and are fully prepared and have taken this in stride, but on the other end of the spectrum, we are definitely talking with and hearing about companies that are learning about this for the first time,” she said in the month leading up to the deadline.
Washburn estimated in early April that half or fewer of the total producers in any of the states were engaged and registered. During a March advisory board meeting, CAA shared that 2,719 producers had registered in California but upward of 3,300 were missing at the time.
Washburn speculated that 50% were simply unaware. Another 10% may have been waiting for final regulations, 15% actively plan not to participate, and the final 25% are in the process of figuring out what to do.
As of early April, he said he was still onboarding clients who hadn’t submitted the baseline data reports in Oregon that were due by March 31, 2025, and had multiple clients who approached him only after receiving delinquency notices from CAA and Oregon DEQ. In fact, only a handful of the clients working with Washburn’s business were fully on track to meet the May 31 deadline.
Still others want to jump ahead to reducing fees via ecomodulation. But “the focus right now is on compliance,” said Anna Kendall, senior manager in EY’s Climate Change and Sustainability Services.
“Overwhelmed and confused” are the main emotions that Baldwin said she’s seeing new clients come in with. While there’s no one factor that explains why some companies had no engagement with the law, Baldwin said that Oregon’s issuance of fines helped kickstart awareness.
“It's been helpful for Oregon to be public, that they're sending those notices out and explaining that process. It helps companies take it seriously,” she said. “Oregon is very organized and managing their program as they said they would, and we’re seeing the violation letters go out and the follow-through with that, so it’s raising awareness.”
Oregon’s delinquency notices and public sharing of a list of noncompliant producers help show “that there really are some teeth to this legislation, which is how it has to be for EPR to work,” Kendall said. “That framing is important for companies.”
There’s still a “significant free-rider problem,” Kendall said, but that’s to be expected in the first few years of any EPR program.
She added that while the staggered reporting deadlines did help companies get into the groove last year, the harmonized date is ultimately closer to how financial reporting is, and will eventually help companies create the greatest efficiency.
Late to report? Don’t panic.
If a company has missed the deadline, the most important thing to do is start working.
The first step is to find out what information each state report needs, and then gather those data to the best of your ability, Baldwin said.
“The general gist is: get information and start organizing it,” she said. “Then it's: do your best, at least the first time, to start to respond to each individual state.”
The first round of responses will feel the most overwhelming, Baldwin added, and she encouraged companies to just keep going.
“While it might seem confusing and overwhelming at first, it becomes easier pretty quickly,” she said. “It's about progress over perfection.”
Anyone who is still waiting to see what happens is “setting themselves up for a very high-risk experience,” Washburn said, both legally and financially.
“Your mission is not to generate a report, your mission is to stand up a compliance program.”
Michael Washburn
founder of Washburn Consulting
“You’re late but it's still early. There’s a certain level of grace,” Washburn said. “You're at highest risk if you're sitting out there doing nothing. Register. Make yourself visible.”
Just by starting the process, you're “dialing down your risk,” he said. Even companies who have gotten a delinquency notice typically have enough time to scrape together a compliant report and avoid serious fines.
“Get on with it and know it’s not impossible,” Washburn said, adding that “there's a way forward and it can be done in a way that is not that painful, but you do have to take a first step.”
He recommended calling a peer company and seeing what they're doing, hiring a compliance consultant, talking to trade associations, and, for global companies, seeing if there are any European colleagues who can help.
A key step to success is creating a strong, cross-functional internal team, Kendall said, “the arithmetic can be simple but compliance is not.”
Creating long-term systems
Companies may be tempted to sit back and relax now that the reporting deadline has passed, but Wasserman said now is the time to review how the reporting went and what needs to be adjusted.
Maybe a producer had a handle on sales data, but needs to drill down into weights and composition. It’s a good time to start those conversations with suppliers, he suggested.
This time is perfect for “identifying where your challenges are, pinpointing what you might be able to do better next time and working through that process,” he said.
Eunomia will be looking to see how some of its initial needs assessment work and modeling from three years ago matches up against the producer data coming in, Wasserman said, and will be making adjustments as needed.
We’re used to doing a lot of analysis on limited data, and now there's so much more data, both at a products level but also at the system level,” he said. “It opens up a lot of doors in terms of thinking about analysis on policy and law, to understand the impact.”
Washburn said companies should make sure the work they’ve done creates a strong base to build on.
“Get your brain out of the data quagmire and focus on governance, because this is a forever problem,” he said. “Your mission is not to generate a report, your mission is to stand up a compliance program.”
That means making sure that decisionmakers are at the table, people who can make choices about source reduction, material usage and long-term goals.
“Is the data chase a big piece of this? Sure it is,” he said. “But you can’t do that until you understand how it fits in the overall program.”
“We’re used to doing a lot of analysis on limited data, and now there’s so much more data.”
Michael Wasserman
senior consultant at Eunomia
The first step is to understand the scope: Where is the company an obligated producer, and for what items? From there, Washburn said data can be collected, both internally and from external suppliers and manufacturers.
“You have to make a bunch of decisions before you start throwing a bunch of data into a spreadsheet,” he said. “That is the piece I think is not well explained to folks.”
This is not a one-person job, Baldwin emphasized. Not only does this kind of compliance take huge amounts of time, but the only way to do it correctly is to get many different roles in one company involved, such as legal, finance and operations.
There are several stages of evolution that she’s seen play out in companies. The first stage is the initial lift to do the first report, where companies are figuring out who needs to be involved and how.
Then comes the adjustment stage, Baldwin said, where companies home in on how to get the data collection and reporting done efficiently.
Next comes the maintenance phase, where companies settle in and feel confident on the long-term reporting.
Those three phases lay the groundwork for the final stage she sees: Companies realizing the immense opportunity that fee optimization can bring, both in a regulatory sense and overall business sense.
“It’s an opportunity to get better information about an important part of their business and then they can take action in a lot of different ways to get more value out of that,” she said. “There’s value, but certainly the regulatory pressure is what they're feeling right now.”
EY focuses on helping clients create a traceable, replicable methodology, Kendall said, then builds up into the possible benefits of EPR. CAA has also reached back out to clients to clarify aspects of reports, which surprised some clients, she added.
“As we start to take a more globally coordinated approach to EPR and drive efficiencies in the reporting side, it also can give visibility to the actual cost of EPR in aggregate,” she said, which could create a better business case for packaging design changes.
Wasserman pointed out that ecomodulation of fees will kick in soon. Now that companies have some experience reporting, he said, they should start to think about those additional factors.
“There’s also a lot of work to be done on some of the tough source reduction goals and making sure all your material is on a collection list or minimum recyclable list,” he said. “The work doesn't stop May 31.”
