A New Packaging Law Is Now Live in 7 States — Here's If It Hits You

A New Packaging Law Is Now Live in 7 States — Here's If It Hits You

If you ship products in a box, bag, bottle, or mailer to customers in California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, or Washington, there's a new law that may already apply to you — and most small business owners have never heard of it. It's called Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, and it shifts the cost of recycling your packaging from local governments onto you, the business that put it into the market.

Seven states have now enacted packaging EPR laws, several with reporting deadlines that already passed earlier this year and annual obligations that continue going forward. If you sell into any of these states — even online, even as a small operation — it's worth five minutes to check where you stand.

What EPR Actually Requires

The basic mechanic is simple: producers register with a state-designated producer responsibility organization, report the type and weight of packaging materials they introduced into that state over the prior year, and pay fees based on that report. The fees aren't flat — they're weighted by how recyclable your packaging is. In Colorado's 2026 fee schedule, for example, aluminum containers carry a base fee of roughly 2 cents per pound, while hard-to-recycle HDPE plastic bottles run closer to 15 cents per pound. The goal, per the laws themselves, is to push all single-use packaging toward being recyclable or compostable by 2032.

Penalties for skipping registration or reporting aren't trivial — violations can carry fees in the tens of thousands of dollars per infraction in some states, which is a brutal number for a business that simply didn't know the law applied to it.

Do You Actually Qualify as a Small Producer?

This is the part most owners get wrong: many EPR laws include exemptions or reduced requirements specifically for small producers, but the thresholds vary state by state, and even exempt businesses often still have to file something.

• California: brands under roughly $1 million in gross sales are expected to be exempt from fees.
• Maine: small producers under $2 million in gross annual revenue are exempt, as are those shipping less than one ton of packaging into the state per year.
• Other states generally use a similar pattern — exemptions tied to global gross revenue under about $2 million, or under one ton of covered packaging material annually.

Here's the catch: qualifying for the small producer exemption in most states still doesn't excuse you from filing a report. You may pay no fee, but you often still need to register and submit simplified reporting to stay compliant. Businesses that assume "I'm small, this doesn't apply to me" and skip the paperwork entirely are the ones most likely to get caught out later.

What to Do This Week

You don't need a sustainability consultant to figure out where you stand. A few practical steps:

• Map where you actually ship. If you sell into any of the seven EPR states — even through a marketplace like Amazon or Etsy — pull your shipping data and estimate your annual revenue and packaging volume into each one.
• Check the specific state's threshold. Revenue and tonnage cutoffs differ by state, so a business exempt in Maine might not be exempt in California.
• Register even if you think you're exempt. Many states require exempt small producers to file a simplified report or exemption claim rather than simply opting out silently.
• Talk to your packaging supplier. Some suppliers are already tracking material weights and recyclability data that you'll need for reporting — ask before you try to reconstruct it yourself.

If your business is still operating without a clear legal structure or license setup, a compliance wake-up call like this is a good reason to get the fundamentals in order. Review your business license requirements alongside this, since state packaging obligations often surface around the same time as other registration renewals. And if you're shipping products under an LLC, make sure your LLC formation paperwork correctly reflects the entity that would be registering with each state's producer responsibility organization.

Why This Keeps Growing

EPR isn't a one-state experiment anymore — it's the direction packaging regulation is heading nationally, and more states are expected to introduce similar bills as the seven current laws prove workable. If you're a business that ships physical products, this is not a one-time compliance chore you knock out and forget; it's an annual reporting cycle you'll need to build into your routine, the same way you handle sales tax filings or annual business license renewals.

The businesses getting burned right now aren't the large corporations with compliance teams — they're small operators who never heard the term "EPR" until a penalty notice showed up. A short review of your shipping footprint today is a lot cheaper than a surprise fee tied to packaging you sold a year ago.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash