Leading the Transition to a Circular Economy with Reuse and Refill

The United States has reached a tipping point in passing extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation. You may – or may not – have heard this “EPR” acronym floating around in the world of waste wonks. In short, EPR is a policy tool that makes consumer brands responsible for the environmental impacts of their products and packaging.

Pushing these policies forward can make EPR a tool to achieve a circular economy for packaging that follows the waste reduction hierarchy of reduce and reuse first, before recycling.

Let’s take a closer look at how EPR can help move the reuse movement forward.

Sparking the EPR Movement

The idea of EPR began in the 1990 when a Swedish economist and engineer named Thomas Lindquist wrote a groundbreaking report suggesting that a producer’s responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products and packaging extended past the point of sale and consumption. 

Essentially, if you make it, you need to take it back.

The idea caught fire in Europe during the 1990s. And in the United States, Upstream was the first national organization to advocate for mandatory EPR policy across the country in the early 2000s. We helped establish and support a movement that has now passed more than 100 EPR laws in nearly 40 states – making companies responsible for the collection and recycling of computers, television sets, cell phones, mercury-containing thermostats, light bulbs, batteries, paint, pesticides, carpet, mattresses, unused pharmaceuticals – and now packaging.

EPR Legislation: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

In 2011, Upstream helped initiate, develop and pass EPR for packaging legislation in the United States. 

Over the next four years, we facilitated dialogues between the solid waste and recycling industry, local governments, brands, packaging suppliers, and retailers. We developed multiple models of legislation and worked with our partners across the country to introduce them into half a dozen states.

Ultimately, our attempts to pass these legislations failed. Brands that tentatively supported EPR pulled out after leadership changes, and the momentum stalled. In 2016, China continued to take our low-value recyclables, and cities still made some money – or at least broke even – by collecting even the lowest-value plastics.

While they would gladly take money from brands under EPR, local governments didn’t want to lose control of their operations. And the big players in the solid waste and recycling industries didn’t want their business models upended. 

Perhaps most of all, consumer brands and their associations – which led the opposition – didn’t feel like they had to do anything. Putting a little bit of money toward recycling initiatives for good PR was enough to keep the regulators at bay.

Visualizing the Impact with Plastic Pollution

In 2015, Upstream began to work more closely with environmental organizations like 5 Gyres Institute, Algalita, and the Plastic Pollution Coalition who were drawing attention to the emerging environmental crisis: plastic pollution. 

We realized that plastic pollution was the poster child for why we needed corporate accountability for packaging waste. So, we pivoted our work to support the development of  #BreakFreeFromPlastic (BFFP), a global movement of more than 2,000 organizations working together to solve plastic pollution. 

How Brand Audits Drove Corporate Accountability

One of the most impactful strategies that BFFP developed was turning beach clean-ups, which had previously focused solely on counting and identifying the types of plastic products found in the environment, into “brand audits” that identified and tracked the brands associated with the plastic products collected.

This tool showed which brands were the biggest plastic polluters in the world. Not surprisingly, from Southeast Asia to Africa, to the US and Europe and beyond, the same brands kept showing up: dominating consumer corporations like Coca Cola, Nestle, Unilever, Pepsi-Co, and P&G.

What was previously under the radar was now a full-blown PR crisis for these companies.

The Tides Turn on Low-Value Recycling

At this time, change was brewing in the recycling landscape, too. 

In the spring of 2017, China announced the “National Sword” policy, building off their previous “Green Fence” policy. Under this rule, they began to inspect and halt shipments of low-value mixed recyclables. 

Up until that point, China had accepted more than half of the world’s recyclable materials. But with the National Sword policy in place, bales of mixed-plastics, which city governments could previously unload for a small profit, became a massive cost. As one Boston City Councilor told Upstream, “When I started, we could sell mixed plastic bales for $10 a ton. Now it costs me $140 a ton to recycle them and only $80 to send them to a landfill. You do the math.”

Local governments across the country did the math. Some decided to still try to recycle the low-value recyclables, while others shut down their recycling operations. 

A Continuing Uphill Battle for EPR

With recycling under scrutiny and brands under pressure, the time is ripe to develop and pass public policy around packaging waste has emerged. 

Unfortunately, the now-resurfaced EPR debate is still missing a huge opportunity to focus further upstream on source reduction and reuse – and building better, more circular systems – rather than just on who pays for recycling.

Upstream’s Recommendations for EPR Policies

With  almost two decades of battle scars from working to push EPR forward, Upstream has developed recommendations for creating impactful and effective policies in the United States: 

1. EPR for packaging is a foundational policy for a circular economy, but the devil is in the details. We need to firmly establish it in the United States – but we also need to know the difference between good EPR and bad EPR policy. The difference largely centers around how it’s structured, who is involved in the decision-making, what the measurements of success are, and how it’s enforced.

2. Second, EPR is not a panacea, and it’s not the ceiling – it’s the floor. Certain brands and associations define EPR as the pinnacle of progress or as a hugely inconvenient regulation. But EPR is just a starting point. To truly reach a circular economy that prioritizes the reduction of resources taken from the planet while building a better standard of living for people around the world, we need a lot more. Upstream developed a Policy Ladder to the Circular Economy and a Reuse Policy Playbook to show how EPR fits into a series of policies that can help get us there. 

3. EPR shouldn’t just be about who pays for recycling and how to optimize it. The impacts of packaging waste are about more than whether packaging ends up in a landfill, in a recycling facility, or as litter. We can greatly minimize the upstream impacts of relying on “one-way, throw-away” packaging by developing new reuse/refill systems for delivering products to consumers. Similarly, reducing unnecessary packaging can hugely impact the overall environmental footprint of product delivery. A recycling-only focus doesn’t prevent litter or mitigate the packaging that winds up in the environment. 

4. Most importantly, EPR should include packaging reduction and reuse/refill targets. The first two Rs – reduce and reuse – are way more important for the environment than recycling. Critical studies on recycling have yet to demonstrate a significant impact in reducing stress on the natural world from commerce. Getting people what they want and need without generating any waste always wins over recycling and single-use.

Envisioning and Building A Waste-Free Future

It’s going to take both public policy and investment from public and private parties to build this new reuse/refill infrastructure that will transform how we get and use our products. 

Reuse/refill targets work like fuel efficiency standards for cars: they apply to each individual auto-maker, who must meet a miles per gallon standard across all the cars they sell each year. 

Similarly, refill targets would apply to each individual company. They would have to sell a certain percentage of their products in reusable packaging by a certain date, starting smaller and adjusting higher over time. This could also be done by sector, focusing on food service, beverage, consumer packaged goods and e-commerce.

Making Strides Across the Nation

Last year, Upstream CEO and Chief Solutioneer Matt Prindiville predicted that 2021 would be the year that EPR for packaging moved forward in the United States. Thanks to the efforts of organizers like Sarah Lakeman at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, EPR packaging legislation passed in Maine and Oregon. In 2022, we expect three or four more states to follow – and within five years, a majority of the country. 

Remember: EPR shouldn’t just be about who pays for recycling. Fundamentally, it should be a policy tool to achieve a circular economy for packaging that follows the waste reduction hierarchy of reduce and reuse first, before recycling. 

It won’t be easy, but the results will be worth it. Let’s work together to get it done.