Five of Seven Deadlines Have Already Passed: Packaging EPR for Small Brands
Seven states have enacted packaging extended producer responsibility laws. If you sell a physical product into any of them and you have never heard of a producer responsibility organization, you have already missed most of the registration windows.
That is not a scare tactic. It is a calendar.
The state of play, August 2026
Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington all have packaging EPR statutes on the books. The Sustainable Packaging Coalition confirmed in its June 2026 policy roundup that no new state enacted one in the 2025 to 2026 period, though New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Tennessee all had bills in play.
Registration deadlines, as they stand:
Colorado: October 1, 2024
Oregon: April 30, 2025
Minnesota: July 1, 2025
California: June 1, 2026
Maryland: July 1, 2026
Washington: producer registration with a PRO, July 1, 2026
Maine: roughly 90 days after the state appoints a stewardship organization, expected late 2026
Circular Action Alliance is the designated or sole PRO in California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington, and is active in Maryland. Maine is running a state-contracted model instead.
Oregon's program is the one with teeth already attached. Penalties run up to $25,000 per day. It is also the one under litigation: the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors won a preliminary injunction in February 2026 covering its members as of that date, and a bench trial concluded in July 2026 with a decision pending as of early August. Every producer who is not an NAW member remains fully obligated in the meantime.
The threshold that decides whether this is your problem
Every state carves out small producers, and the tests are close enough to look identical and different enough to catch you.
Oregon: under $5 million in global annual revenue, or under 1 metric ton of covered product into the state
Colorado: under $5 million in gross revenue, adjusted annually for inflation, or under 1 ton
Washington: under $5 million global revenue, or under 1 ton
Minnesota: under $2 million global gross revenue, or under 1 ton
Maryland: under $2 million global gross revenue, or under 1 ton
Maine: under $2 million for the first three years, rising to $5 million in year four, or under 1 ton
California: under $1 million in gross annual sales, and you must apply for the exemption rather than simply qualifying for it
Read the revenue tests carefully, because they are global, not in-state. A brand doing $300,000 in Oregon on $6 million nationally fails Oregon's revenue test and has to fall back on the tonnage test. Oregon's own DEQ guidance recommends that producers close to the thresholds register anyway. California tightened its standard in the final regulations that took effect May 1, 2026: applicants must justify the exemption on the basis of unique challenges, and CalRecycle can terminate it if circumstances change materially.
The DTC trap in Washington
Washington's statute defines the producer, for online commerce, as the entity that packages the product for shipment. If you box your own direct orders, you own the mailer, the tape, and the void fill as covered material. That is a different obligation from the one on the retail carton, and it catches brands who assumed EPR was a retail-shelf problem.
What the fees actually cost
Circular Action Alliance published real 2026 rate schedules, which makes this concrete instead of theoretical.
Oregon, 2026, per pound: corrugated cardboard 8 cents, glass bottles 10 cents, aluminum containers 6 cents, clear PET bottles 25 cents, pigmented HDPE bottles 32 cents, and flexible film 43 cents. The sustainability incentive component sits at zero cents across all materials this year, so eco-modulation exists structurally but is not yet financially active.
Colorado, 2026, per pound: paper 6 cents, glass 4 cents, aluminum 2 cents, PET clear bottles 15 cents, film 48 cents, plastic laminates 74 cents, and polystyrene foam 172 cents. Colorado's eco-modulation is live: 5% more for materials that disrupt recycling, 5% less for high-recycling-rate materials.
Run the arithmetic on your own bill of materials and the point lands fast. A brand shipping 5,000 pounds a year of laminated stand-up pouches into Colorado owes $3,700 there alone. The same 5,000 pounds in corrugated costs $300. One material decision, a twelve-fold swing, repeated in every state you sell into.
Both states offer flat fees for low-volume producers. Colorado runs $800 for one to 2.5 tons up to $3,600 for 7.5 to 10 tons. Oregon offers tiers between $1,200 and $5,800 for producers under $10 million in revenue.
What this changes about packaging decisions
The practical consequence is that material selection stopped being purely a cost and aesthetics decision and became a recurring liability with a published price per pound.
Fiber is cheap under every schedule. Flexible film and laminates are expensive under every schedule. If you have been weighing a pouch against a carton on unit cost alone, add the per-pound fee for every state you ship into and rerun it. Plenty of small brands looking at how to package soap or any other bar-format product will find that the boring paper option now wins on two lines instead of one.
Reporting is by material type and weight sold into each state, submitted through the PRO's portal on an annual cycle, and dues lag the data year. Colorado's 2026 dues were calculated from 2024 supply data and invoiced in two installments in January and July 2026.
Where to start
Pull your packaging specification sheets and get weights by material for every component, including shipping materials. If your co-manufacturer boxes your product, ask them for that data in writing now rather than in May. Brands ordering customized soap, beverages, or anything else made and filled by a partner often find the material data lives with the partner and has never been compiled.
One last honest note. Nobody knows how many obligated producers exist. Circular Action Alliance reported 1,742 registered producers across California, Colorado, and Oregon as of late 2024 and did not estimate what share of the universe that represented. No regulator has published one either. Enforcement so far has emphasized awareness over penalties. That posture will not hold forever, and Washington is statutorily required to begin pursuing unregistered producers by 2029.
