Your guide to packaging EPR, state by state.

Tier 1 is not the general rule. It is drafted narrowly enough that it catches only manufacturer-own-brand goods and packaging with no brand identification. Reading it as “the manufacturer always pays” is as wrong as reading the brand owner into tier 1.

Being unable to see your volumes is not the same as being exempt. Every tonnage test is per state, so you have to estimate before you can know whether you fall under it.

A contract clause does not move the obligation. Maryland is the single exception, and it requires a written certification under its own rule. Everywhere else the statute decides, not the supply agreement.

A missed window is recoverable, and exposure increases with each subsequent reporting cycle. What to do if you are behind.

Seven: Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington. Oregon and Colorado are already invoicing. California charges an early fee in 2026 with the full program from 2027. The other three are later still. See all seven with their laws, thresholds and fee status.

Three have already passed: the May 31 annual supply reports in six states, the June 1 California registration deadline, and the July 1 Washington PRO membership date. If you missed one, file late rather than staying silent. See what is still ahead in the next 90 days, and the passed list underneath it.

CAA is the appointed producer responsibility organization in every state that has one. Register once at circularactionalliance.org, sign the Participant Producer Agreement, then add each state. One portal, one reporting deadline, separate state addenda. See what registration through CAA actually covers.

Rates are per material category and the spread is wide: aluminum and corrugated sit at the bottom, multi-layer laminates and expanded polystyrene at the top, with more than a twenty-fold gap between them. Only three states have published a schedule. Price your own packaging in the Toolkit, or see which schedules actually exist.

It adjusts your fee up or down for design attributes, and it works differently in every state. Oregon’s current cycle is bonus-only and the bonuses require a life cycle assessment. Colorado applies passive factors automatically and has not published the values of its four active incentives. No other state has set values yet. Treat any headline percentage you read elsewhere as unverified. See the eco-modulation detail on each state page.

These are statutory maximums, not automatic fines. Oregon is the only state actively enforcing, at up to $25,000 per day, and it published its first quarterly noncompliance list in April 2026. California authorises up to $50,000 per day per violation, or $25,000 for a small producer, and nothing accrues until 30 days after a notice of violation (PRC 42081). Minnesota’s ceiling is higher still, up to $100,000 per day for a third violation, but no stewardship plan has been approved so nothing can accrue there yet. See the maximum penalty for each state.

New Jersey is the highest-priority pending state, with Illinois next. New York’s PRRIA failed for a second year in June 2026 and returns in 2027; Massachusetts died at the July 31, 2026 session close and must be refiled. Rhode Island and Hawaii have needs-assessment laws rather than full EPR. See active bills and earlier-stage states.

U.S. packaging EPR programs are evolving rapidly: deadlines, thresholds, fee rates and exemptions change as rules are finalized, and several programs are currently subject to litigation. Verify all information with the Circular Action Alliance, the relevant state agency, or qualified legal counsel before taking any compliance action.

Figures labeled Signaled or Speculative are planning estimates drawn from draft rules and filed program plans. They are not rates you will be invoiced, and they should not be used as the sole basis for a budget or a filing. The three labels are defined at the top of this page.

One polymer family

Mono-material is rewarded. Mixed and multilayer constructions are penalized.

Clear or light PET

Clear unpigmented, or transparent light blue or light green only. Carbon black and other near-infrared-undetectable dark colorants make PET non-recyclable, because most sorters cannot see them at all.

No problem resins

PVC and PVDC, PS and EPS, and rigid PETG are flagged by APR and targeted for elimination by the U.S. Plastics Pact.

Compatible, separable components

Closures, pumps, labels, sleeves and liners are recyclability-determining, not accessories. Metal springs and full-body sleeves are flagged.

The small-format test

Parts two inches or under in two dimensions must pass APR's size-sortation protocol or they fall through the screens at a materials recovery facility.

Compatible inks and coatings

Heavy inks, dark pigments and wash-resistant coatings contaminate the recycled stream and interfere with optical sorting.

Real on-pack instructions

How2Recycle is the standard North American label, and APR Preferred designs are likelier to qualify as widely recyclable.

Features that push a plastic package into higher fees

A plastic package may be labeled recyclable in California only if its material type and form is collected by programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and is sorted by facilities serving at least 60 percent of the state's programs, consistent with CalRecycle's covered material category determination. A material can alternatively qualify with a demonstrated recycling rate of at least 75 percent.

The 60 percent test is about access, not the recycling rate. There is no simple weight cutoff, but a detractor that pushes an item out of a recyclable type and form, a full-body sleeve or carbon black for instance, can disqualify it on its own.

The covered material category determination is category-level and does not clear an on-pack claim by itself. SB 343's population-coverage test applies on top of it, with a compliance date of October 4, 2026.

Enforcement is currently paused. On July 14, 2026 a federal court granted a preliminary injunction barring the Attorney General from enforcing SB 343 until further order, finding four provisions unconstitutionally vague and holding the law fails First Amendment scrutiny. Those four provisions were severed, so the 60 percent collection-and-sorting threshold survives on paper. The ruling is preliminary and a Ninth Circuit appeal is expected, so design to the test rather than to the pause. With SB 343 enforcement enjoined, the covered material category list is the operative recyclability determination in California. See the California litigation detail.

How2Recycle is the leading North American on-pack recycling label, run by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, covering plastic, glass, fiber and metal. It uses the same access-to-recovery logic as SB 343: the format must be collected from a meaningful share of households, sortable at a materials recovery facility, reprocessable, and sold into an end market. APR-preferred design helps a package qualify. Real-world collection access is what sets the tier.

How2Recycle is voluntary and national. SB 343 is mandatory and California-specific. They usually point the same way and they are assessed separately, so label with How2Recycle and confirm the SB 343 determination before selling in California.

Glass is optically sorted, and the sorter reads each piece as glass or as a ceramic, stone or porcelain contaminant based on how much light passes through it. For decorated cosmetic glass, opacity rather than color is what usually causes rejection.

Light transmission

Target 5 percent or above. Below roughly 2 percent a package is rejected as a contaminant; 3 percent is the observed minimum that passes. This one number covers lacquering, silk-screen and dark or feeder color.

Opacity, not color

All colors can sort as glass. Opacity is what makes the sorter read a piece as a contaminant.

Soda-lime only

The only container-glass chemistry with a North American curbside stream. Borosilicate, opal and aluminosilicate contaminate the cullet.

Metallization is chemistry

Metallic coatings contaminate cullet at parts per million and must be blended down even when the piece sorts correctly. Use as an accent or remove.

Small formats

Containers and closures at or under about 2.5 inches, sample and perfume vials, drop out of recovery regardless of the glass.

Sorting as glass is not the same as being recycled into glass. Mixed and tinted cullet has weaker end markets and often becomes landfill cover or aggregate; clear flint glass has the strongest bottle-to-bottle demand. Labels and sleeves separate during crushing and do not impede recovery. Ceramic swing-top closures are a contaminant.

Clean fiber is among the most recyclable packaging in the U.S. What kills it is what gets added to it: plastic coatings, lamination and heavy metallization.

Uncoated and clean

Uncoated paperboard is recyclable in California at about 30 percent; corrugated at about 68 percent, the strongest recyclable secondary pack there is.

No plastic coating or lamination

California treats poly-coated paperboard as non-recyclable, recycled at under 6 percent, and reclassifies double-sided poly-coated board as a multi-material laminate, which raises the fee.

Limit foil and metallization

Solid metal foil and heavy metallized decoration move fiber toward non-recyclable, on the same coverage logic as plastics.

Cartons are their own stream

Aseptic and gable-top cartons are collected in some programs, Oregon's statewide list among them, but are not on California's recyclable list. Check by state.

A mono-aluminum or mono-steel can, bottle, tube or closure recycles at close to its full weight, and standard decoration is separable in reprocessing rather than disqualifying. For aerosols the gating question in the U.S. is collection access, not design.

Keep it mono-metal

Only metallic aluminum counts as recyclable value. Laminates are defensible, since the plastic burns off in reprocessing, but true mono-aluminum maximizes recovered weight.

Coatings

Eliminate PFAS coatings, which are targeted by state packaging bans, and vapor-deposited metallized layers, which count as loss rather than recyclable content. Carbon black is a plastics sorting problem, not a barrier to metal recycling.

Small size is not a barrier

Modern sorters recover even very small metal items. Any minimum-metal-content rule is economic rather than a recyclability determinant.

Aerosols

Solve access, not design. Cans must be empty. The industry initiative targets 85 percent recycling access by 2030. Non-aerosol aluminum is recyclable in California at under 39 percent.

The per-format design detail is European; the physics translate, but the U.S. recyclability determination comes from the CalRecycle category list and aerosol collection access from the industry initiative. Signaled

Decoration is where design most often quietly breaks recyclability, and the rules differ by substrate.

The exact plastics metallization limit sits in an APR sorting resource. The 12 mm and 16 mm figures come from APR program guidance rather than the primary document, which is why they are marked signaled.

CalRecycle's January 2026 covered material category list is the authoritative California reference under SB 54. For the first time it publishes an estimated recycling rate for each category alongside the recyclable determination. The gap between the two is the point: a format can be deemed recyclable and still be recycled at a single-digit rate. This is a working subset of 95 categories.

Almost always you, not the supplier. The obligation follows the brand on the package. Your packaging manufacturer generally has data duties rather than a filing duty. The exception worth checking is where you sell unbranded packaging or components onward, which can put you in the producer tier for those items.

Possibly, and the tests are more generous than people assume, but they differ. Colorado and Oregon exempt a producer meeting any one of several criteria, and both operate automatically. California has no tonnage exemption and its small producer exemption must be applied for and approved. Critically, the Colorado and Oregon revenue thresholds are measured on company-wide revenue, not sales in that state.

In California, yes. SB 54 reaches primary, secondary and tertiary packaging placed on the California market whether the sale is to a consumer or a business, so a company selling only to business customers is still an obligated producer there. Colorado and Oregon generally exclude business-to-business transport packaging. Do not assume transport packaging is out of scope everywhere.

Weight by material category, adjusted for recyclability. Well-sorted high-value materials such as aluminum, clear PET and corrugated sit at the low end. Flexible film, multi-material laminates and foam sit at the high end, sometimes by an order of magnitude. That spread is why component-level material data matters more than total tonnage.

In Oregon, sometimes yes, in two different ways. The voluntary eco-modulation bonuses all require an LCA conducted to ISO 14040 and 14044 with third-party critical review. Separately, Oregon requires its largest producers to submit mandatory life cycle evaluations on DEQ templates, first due December 31, 2026. Neither is a general requirement in California or Colorado today.

No. Seven challenges are live, including a seventeen-state action against California filed in June 2026 and a case tried in Oregon in July 2026 with a ruling expected. None has produced an injunction reaching producers generally, nothing is stayed, and deadlines and penalties remain in force. A program under challenge is still a program in force. The litigation tracker carries every active case and what each one does and does not pause.

Less than people hope. CAA runs the portal, validates submissions, files with the agencies and invoices you, but it cannot tell you which entity is obligated, cannot build your bill of materials, and has no view on whether your packaging should change. The judgment and the data stay with you.

Importing a rule from somewhere else. European mechanisms applied to U.S. states, one state's bonus assumed to exist in another, or last year's threshold assumed to still hold. The programs look similar and differ in exactly the places that cost money.