I’ve spent the past year in conversations with packaging leaders from major brands, converters, and suppliers as EPR legislation has expanded across the United States. One theme keeps surfacing: nobody told design.
We have been here before. Sustainability became an afterthought because it entered the process too late. We cannot make the same mistake with EPR.
What EPR Is & Why It Matters
Extended Producer Responsibility is a policy framework that places the financial cost of packaging end-of-life management directly on the brands that put that packaging into the market. If you make it, sell it, or ship it into an EPR state, you register with a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO), report your packaging data, and pay fees based on the type, weight, and recyclability of your packaging.
This is not policy designed to punish. EPR works. The evidence from countries that have implemented EPR is compelling. British Columbia’s Recycle BC program, North America’s first full EPR system for packaging, achieved an 83% overall recovery rate in 2024 and has provided recycling access to 99% of households in the province. Germany reached a 67% recycling rate for all packaging under its EPR system. Japan’s EPR system achieved a 93% recycling rate for PET bottles. EPR also drives innovation: it creates direct financial incentives to design packaging that is simpler, lighter, and more recyclable from the start. That is exactly where designers come in.
Seven states have now passed comprehensive packaging EPR laws: California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. Six more introduced legislation in 2026. This is not a future concern for CPG brands. It is a present one.
Who It Affects
Revenue thresholds vary by state, but brands generating $2 million or more in annual global revenue are already within scope in states like Minnesota and Maryland. Other states set the bar higher. Selling into multiple states via retail, e-commerce, or distribution compounds your exposure quickly, because each state has its own definitions, deadlines, and fee structures. Size alone does not determine exemption. Where and how you sell matters just as much.
The fee exposure is significant: EPR fees range from $10,000 to tens of millions per jurisdiction depending on packaging volume and material type. Oregon has already published a noncompliance list. States are actively finding unregistered companies through tax IDs. Noncompliance lists are public. If your brand isn’t registered and should be, your competitors can see that.
What Brands Are Getting Wrong
Charlotte Ashcraft, senior manager of packaging and graphics development at Just Born Quality Confections, reframed it precisely at the recent Packaging Recycling Summit: she had been treating EPR as a policy problem, and it wasn’t working. Then she realized it’s fundamentally a packaging data problem. Every state is asking for the same information: how much packaging, by material type and weight, is entering their market. If you don’t have that data organized by SKU, your reporting is wrong and your fees are wrong.
The design team is almost never part of that conversation. Neither, it turns out, are most suppliers. In a recent survey of packaging suppliers, fewer than 1% knew what EPR was, even though many are almost certainly obligated producers themselves. That is the gap, and it is costing brands.
Why Designers Matter More Than Ever
For years, sustainable packaging was treated as a nice-to-have. Someone in ops would swap in the cheaper pouch because it saved three cents per unit. The sustainability conversation, if it happened at all, got cut when margins got tight. That calculus just changed permanently.
Every material choice is now a financial and regulatory decision. States are building eco-modulation into their EPR fee structures: the less recyclable your packaging, the more you pay. A mono-material recyclable structure pays lower fees. A flexible film pouch, a multi-layer laminate, a stand-up bag with a foil interior: those carry the highest burden, because the infrastructure to recycle them at curbside barely exists. California is already signaling fines and material bans for producers who miss recycling rate targets. The Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s 2026 Trends Report puts it plainly: regulations will stay as strict as they are today, or get stricter.
So why does this land in design’s lap? Because the designer specifies the substrate. Chooses between a kraft pouch and a recyclable PE alternative. Decides whether a label is paper or a film wrap that contaminates the whole package at sortation. Determines whether a secondary structure is even necessary. These are not finishing decisions. They are the decisions that determine a brand’s EPR fee burden, year after year, in every state they sell into.
The brands that pushed back on sustainable packaging investment used to have an easy argument: consumers don’t pay a premium for it, the margin hit is real, and recyclability claims are murky. That argument is gone. EPR turns every non-recyclable material choice into a recurring line item in the P&L. EPR has driven measurable investment in recycling technology innovation globally, creating economic opportunity alongside environmental accountability. The brands that lean into better material specification are not just reducing compliance costs. They are participating in the next generation of packaging innovation.
A designer who understands eco-modulation can walk into a brief and say: this material will cost you X in annual EPR fees across your active states, and this alternative reduces that exposure while hitting the same shelf presence. That is strategy. That is risk management. That is a packaging designer earning a seat at the table with finance and operations, not just marketing.
What Needs to Shift
Material selection cannot happen at the end of a design process as a production detail. It has to be part of the strategic foundation, alongside brand positioning, retail environment, and cost targets. Before a concept is sketched, a brand should know its packaging material inventory, the recyclability profile of each structure in current and pending EPR states, and the fee implications of the choices on the table.
There is another reason this has to happen upstream: EPR fee structures are retroactive. Fees arrive after the year has ended, after packaging decisions have already been made, after budgets are closed. You cannot course-correct on a material choice you made 18 months ago. The only way to manage EPR costs is to design for them before they exist.
The practical sequence:
• Audit your packaging portfolio by material type, structure, and weight. Clean data is the foundation. Without accurate inputs, nothing downstream works.
• Map that portfolio against current EPR requirements and the trajectory of states coming online.
• Build EPR context into the design brief as a hard constraint, not a footnote. Recyclability, material category, and eco-modulation implications belong alongside brand standards and shelf environment from day one.
• Specify materials that reduce fee exposure, reduce regulatory risk, and support on-pack sustainability claims that are actually defensible.
This is no longer simply good environmental practice. It is good business.
The Opportunity
EPR is the policy mechanism the industry has needed for a long time. It aligns financial incentives with environmental outcomes and rewards brands that design with intention. The brands that treat it as a design strategy problem, not a compliance scramble, will move faster, spend less, and build packaging systems with a longer runway.
The studios that understand this and can bring it into the brief from the start will be the ones worth hiring. This is exactly the kind of work sustainable design was always supposed to do.
Resources Worth Bookmarking
Sustainable Packaging Coalition Maintains the most comprehensive EPR policy tracker in the U.S., updated in real time as legislation moves.
rePurpose Global Offers practical compliance tools built specifically for CPG brands navigating multi-state reporting.