Maine DEP’s Stewardship Organization solicitation, RFP-202605094, was published on June 15, 2026 and closed on
August 18, 2026 at 4:00 p.m. with zero proposals submitted. DEP announced this on August 20 and said it “is assessing all options at this time; further information will be forthcoming in a future newsletter.” The Circular Action Alliance, which was the only expected bidder and which holds the equivalent role in California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, publicly declined to bid on August 19. CAA said the RFP’s scope did not align with its operational practices, systems, and data stewardship standards, and that it had no visibility into the full requirements until the RFP issued. It left open the possibility of bidding on a future solicitation. The program stays at step 4 of DEP’s nine-step process, where it has sat since December 2024.
What this means for you: nothing changes today, and that is the whole point. Maine producers still have no registration, no reporting, and no fee obligation, because the registration clock only starts within 90 days of a Stewardship Organization making a registration mechanism available, and there is no Stewardship Organization. Maine is now the only state with an enacted packaging EPR law and no organization in place. If you had Maine startup fees in a late 2026 budget, take them out: DEP has said it intends to reassess the anticipated dates for producer start-up registration and invoicing, so the previous “late 2026” expectation no longer rests on anything. Alternative Collection Program applications are also frozen, since DEP only begins accepting them the day it and a Stewardship Organization enter into a contract. Source:
Maine DEP, Stewardship Organization RFP-202605094 Announcement (August 20, 2026, read in full); CAA’s decision reported by
Resource Recycling (August 19, 2026).
Update, September 24, 2026: two points in this entry are corrected. The August 19 date for CAA’s decision comes from Resource Recycling’s report of that day; CAA’s own Maine page says it “has decided not to submit a bid in response to Maine’s RFP”, and its August 21, 2026 newsletter carries the statement.
Update, September 25, 2026: CAA’s August 2026 newsletter carries no send date; it is headed “August 2026” and lists press items dated August 20, so cite it as the August 2026 newsletter, not August 21. And the program had not sat at step four since December 2024: DEP’s program page lists step three as Packaging Material Types List Adoption and says Chapter 428 was amended after its December 2024 adoption to add that list as Appendix A, and step four, contracting with a Stewardship Organization, began with the June 15, 2026 RFP.
(Corrected October 8, 2026: DEP’s announcement names no expected bidder, so CAA should not have been called the only one. CAA is the PRO in the six other enacted states, and its Maine page says the RFP “as scoped is not aligned with our operational practices, systems and data stewardship standards”.)