Organizations representing brand owners and packaging companies are calling for greater harmonization across extended producer responsibility laws and legislation, where proliferation has added layers of complexity to compliance.
The spread of packaging EPR in the United States happened slowly — then very quickly.
“It took years to get to the first two states” — Maine and Oregon — but then within a period of a few years, “it went from two states to seven states with enacted laws,” said Danielle Waterfield, Ameripen’s policy director.
There could be benefits to states saying “‘oh, yeah, me too, what they did,’ but they're not doing that,” Waterfield said. “The first few states started very independent with their own ideas. You had Maine with East Coast perspectives, and you had Oregon with very different West Coast perspectives,” reflecting unique economic and cultural factors, and resulting in varied definitions, timelines and frameworks.
Still, there’s much consensus among stakeholders that areas such as producer definitions and covered material categories could be more aligned across states. But what would it mean to harmonize, and what’s possible?
National consistency, regional flexibility
Groups representing producer interests are generally calling for greater harmonization, while maintaining some state-to-state flexibility.
The EPR Leadership Forum, which represents manufacturers and retailers of consumer packaged goods, shared its position on harmonization opportunities this fall. It’s more focused on affecting change in future programs versus working to harmonize existing ones.
When the forum talks about harmonization, “I think what we're really talking about is developing some sort of national consistency, while allowing for regional flexibility” in program plans and “rates and dates,” said Alchemy Graham, policy director at the EPR Leadership Forum. Put another way, it’s important to have “a standardized, consistent framework that we can all work off of and tailor to individual state recycling markets and state infrastructure needs as necessary.”
First thing’s first, it’s important to harmonize basics like producer and recycling definitions, as well as covered material lists. “I think that once we can get those particular things harmonized, then we'd be in a really good place to move forward with other definitions and other pieces of the framework,” Graham said.
The forum will focus heavily on legislator education in 2026. “We really want to get in the door and have those conversations before the legislation is developed,” Graham said.
The U.S. Plastics Pact also recently released a policy position paper on EPR. “While harmonization of core elements such as definitions, scope, and performance metrics is essential to reduce complexity and administrative burden, flexibility is equally important to accommodate state-specific realities such as infrastructure, data availability, and market conditions,” USPP wrote.
Coordination led by a producer responsibility organization will also be key for multi-state harmonization, in lieu of federal harmonization, USPP wrote.
PRO’s perspective
Creating a stronger foundation across state programs can start with the producer responsibility organization playing a central role in needs assessments, according to Shane Buckingham, chief of staff at Circular Action Alliance, the PRO active in numerous U.S. states. “Our preference is to manage the needs assessment process” as a first step in development, Buckingham said.
The national nature of CAA is designed to be a strength, “to ensure that we can deliver consistent reporting and compliance to producers,” Buckingham said. Like others, he highlighted covered material categories as among the key areas for harmonization, noting different approaches across multiple states.
“So for instance, California, it establishes its own covered material categories which can be updated on an annual basis. Oregon: We established the reporting categories, but then they needed to be approved as part of the program plan. In Colorado, we were able to map those reporting categories. But then in Minnesota and Maryland, we were going to have to go through a state-led process on the development of covered material categories,” Buckingham explained.
In Minnesota and Maryland, for instance, CAA intends to establish its own early reporting process using simplified categories. “However, if a state has a requirement for the regulator to establish the covered material categories, then we will need to use those categories going forward,” Buckingham said.
If a national list were established, then “that can cascade into the appropriate categories by state,” but CAA is already seeing too much variation in this area, “so that that is something that will likely need to be worked out over time.”
Adjustments that require rules changes would be time-intensive. “From our perspective, we're going to do everything we can to ensure the greatest harmonization, to the greatest extent possible, without further regulatory change,” Buckingham said.
With some of the earliest laws, “when these EPR bills were being discussed, people were working with the information they had at the time,” Buckingham said. But there have been some more recent positive signs for harmonization: “We've started to see consistency in the producer definition from Minnesota to Maryland to Washington.”
It’s a normal part of the policy process to “look back and reflect on what works well and what is creating an unnecessary challenge in implementation,” he said.
Different priorities, different programs
Another area that CAA highlighted for harmonization is responsible end markets.
“Having a national standard that we can apply to identify, verify and audit responsible end markets is very important,” Buckingham said, noting CAA was recently working to establish a standard development committee focused on this topic.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality hears those calls, said Program Plan Lead Nicole Portley, and sees some potential there for harmonization, including through a single auditing method for the downstream facilities that could be used to meet multiple states’ requirements. Yet DEQ is also cautious.
“I think we're reticent that the call for harmonization on that front be kind of a veiled call for a race to the bottom,” Portley said.
DEQ takes responsible end markets very seriously, in part because they are pivotal in the the origin story of Oregon's law, Portley said.
Oregonians value the state’s leadership in recycling, she said, so the realization in the 2010s that waste collected for recycling was sometimes ending up abroad or being burned “was a big blow to the public trust in the system,” she said. “The law endeavors to repair that trust.”
On responsible end markets, draft rules in California and adopted rules in Oregon have similarities, Portley said, whereas Colorado is more sparse on this issue. “I think they left a lot of the responsible end market implementation to the program plan,” Portley said.
The idea of harmonization becomes trickier when “the extent to which states emphasize that policy lever differ from one another,” she said. Each law is particular, reflecting different state-specific priorities. Portley does still see potential for states to align definitions for producers and covered products. Logistically, though, some types of harmonization might require statutory changes.
Maine opted to pass a law in 2025 clarifying definitions for producers and other aspects of its 2021 packaging EPR law. And Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection “aligned the majority of proposed packaging material types with the producer reporting categories used in the Colorado and Oregon programs,” per a September update.
In Oregon, state regulators don’t want to decide on harmonization-inspired changes too quickly. “I think we need some time to see how these different approaches in the different states pan out. We need some evidence from implementation,” which most states haven’t yet begun, Portley noted.
“I think we’re glad that there has not been statutory change in the four years of startup that went into the start date, so that we were able to kind of stick with the plan,” Portley said. The next opportunity to revisit would likely be in 2027, Portley said.
Ameripen’s Waterfield also noted that greater data and lessons from CAA will be especially helpful for legislators considering future programs, as lawmakers in the U.S. previously relied on data from programs in Europe and Canada, where infrastructure and other factors were very different.
“The ultimate path to harmonization in the U.S. is federal legislation,” Portley said. “If producers are really wanting something fully harmonized, they may have to go that route, but it's probably not a fast route.” No such bill has been introduced.
