Disruption in the system

Since 2021, four states—Maine, California, Oregon and Colorado—have adopted extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation. Two others, Illinois and Maryland, have passed what some recyclers have dubbed “pre-EPR,” or laws requiring states to perform needs assessments and envision what EPR could look like.

As states increasingly consider EPR or similar policies, they could be viewed as a disruption of established recycling systems. During the session Legislative Disruption at the Recycling Today Media Group’s Paper & Plastics Recycling Conference in Chicago in October, Resa Dimino, managing principal at Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Resource Recycling Systems and a managing partner at its policy subsidiary, the Signalfire Group, said several reasons contribute to EPR’s growing presence.

“First and foremost is to increase recycling, increase diversion and increase recovery,” Dimino said. “We all know recycling rates have been stagnant for a long time, and there are a lot of stakeholders who are unhappy with that state of affairs and want to see us bring change [and] see how we can do things differently. EPR has proven to increase recycling across the world and across the U.S., and so it’s a good approach for this.”

She also said EPR can help reduce recycling costs for local governments that might not have the resources to expand existing programs. Thirdly, she said, EPR can steer producers toward incorporating the cost of end-of-life management into a product or package.

EPR and similar policies, though, can look very different from state to state.

Eye of the beholder

At the session, Robin Wiener, president of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), noted not all forms of industry disruption are negative, “especially that which is industry-led.”

But, she added, some legislative disruptors can be negative to a certain extent even though they’re being done in the name of solutions and the advancement of recycling. “While these [laws similar to EPR] go back many years, it’s really only over, maybe, the last five to six years we’ve really seen this tsunami of pushes on the state level, and even the federal level, for EPR, bottle bills and such,” she said. “You can name them all and they’re all done to solve the problem and solve the recycling crisis.”

In Wiener’s estimation, legislation in China—the National Sword policy enacted in 2018 that restricted scrap imports—disrupted the U.S. residential recycling system the most. “Even though that’s probably less than 15 percent of all recycling in the U.S., that’s what everyone knows,” she said. “It’s that blue bin at the end of the driveway. So, the local councilman, regulators [and] policymakers, that’s when they see and hear about that [and] they think recycling is broken.”

Wiener said there are other triggers, such as growing complexity in packaging design, a lack of control over what residents place in their bins, quality issues as well as issues on the demand side. “There are these problems that have been coming together that have resulted in policymakers wanting to help us, and that comes in the form of these legislative disruptors,” she said.

ISRI generally is not supportive of EPR because of the concern it could disrupt the marketplace and the current recycling infrastructure that works well, Wiener said, though she admitted EPR can be helpful at times, such as when ISRI worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, steelmakers and automakers to develop a system to remove mercury switches from end-of-life vehicles that were contaminating ferrous streams.

“It was temporary in nature,” Wiener said of that system. “Once the [switches] were all out, it stopped, and that’s what we view as a working EPR system. The design is to get those hard-to-recycle or difficult items that we need out of the stream.”

When EPR laws are being formulated, Wiener said recyclers need to be at the table to help ensure a system that works. She advocated for third-party assessments that measure what the capacity is, where the gaps are and what the costs are, saying EPR systems need an off-ramp—especially for paper packaging—to ensure the legislation only covers those materials for which EPR is needed because there isn’t a market.

“Right now, [paper] is a mature market,” she said. “For those materials that are included, you need that off-ramp, so that once the market matures, it’s no longer part of the system.”

In addition, she said EPR laws should feature a list of excluded items to keep EPR narrowly focused on the materials that would benefit from the legislation; fees should reflect the true costs of the system; and recyclers should be included as part of an advisory board to help design and oversee the EPR system.

Shannon Crawford Gay, director of recycling and environmental policy at Houston-based WM, which operates 97 material recovery facilities (MRFs) throughout North America and recycles 7.3 million tons of paper annually, said the company is making significant investments in improving its recycling operations to produce higher-quality bales, but legislative disruption will impact its ability to meet those goals. Some of that impact is viewed positively, and some of it still is unknown.

WM’s position on EPR varies by state, but Crawford Gay said the company prefers that local control is maintained, honoring existing infrastructure, contracts and franchise agreements. “We can work within a variety of systems,” she said, “but our preference for these EPR systems, which are generally based on residential recycling, would be to continue working with the municipalities as opposed to a PRO [producer responsibility organization] that then contracts with the municipalities.”

She noted WM has long supported EPR policies for large, bulky materials and items that shouldn’t be placed in residential bins but has taken a different stance on each of the four states that have enacted sweeping EPR legislation for paper and packaging.

The company was involved in and supported the formation of Oregon’s system, but it did not support the policy in Colorado because of “so many unknowns,” as well as its use of a PRO that will have a great deal of control over the system. WM had a seat at the table as California’s system was built but chose a neutral position. The company doesn’t operate in Maine and chose not to engage in the debate there.

Shining examples

Wiener used ISRI’s recently released Fiber Recycling Readiness Tool as an example of a positive disruption guided by the recycling industry.

The research-based online tool was developed to assess the compatibility of typical fiber-based packaging with the U.S. residential recycling system and help boost paperboard packaging recycling. The tool also can help brands use design for recycling principles to create fiber-based packaging that can flow through established recycling infrastructure in the U.S.

According to ISRI, the tool can help decrease contamination at MRFs and increase the quality of bales sent to consuming mills. It automatically scores a set of criteria and shares a color-coded result to determine whether the packaging meets the criteria (green), has challenges requiring modifications (yellow) or does not meet the criteria (red) and also provides individualized feedback on design choices that could improve a package’s recyclability.

Wiener said a manufacturer successfully used the tool for its fiber-based packaging for shipping televisions.

“We’re working very closely with The Recycling Partnership, which is utilizing it as well,” she said. “We’ve worked with AF&PA [American Forest & Paper Association] and other partners to make sure that this works with other systems that are out there.”

She also pointed to ISRI’s work with manufacturers and brands on designing products for recycling and recognizing companies that do so, such as Hartsville, South Carolina-based Sonoco. Last year, that company developed a fiber-based blister package that is fully recyclable and replaces a plastic version of the blister packaging.

Wiener said examples of beneficial disruption include ISRI’s involvement in government public-private partnerships, promoting recycling education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade and giving recognition to policymakers who understand the importance of recycling.

Directing their gaze

As energy around recycling policy gains momentum, the panel considered the best ways to direct it.

Wiener said energy at the federal level should be directed to education and understanding the benefits of recycling.

Crawford Gay recommended states considering EPR or similar policies should address gaps in their existing systems. She used pending EPR legislation in the state of Washington, which already has robust recycling programs in place, as an example.

“With Washington state and [its EPR] bill, one of the things we really want to recommend is to look at where the gaps are in the system,” she said. “Where are the places in Washington state that don’t have recycling? And if there are these places that don’t have access to recycling, what does it cost to get it? What does it look like in terms of improving capacity within that state? [WM’s] preference is that if states want to use legislation to boost their recycling numbers, it can’t just be a blanket.”

The panelists agreed the key to successful legislative disruption is residents participating in the recycling system.

“We’ve got technology, smart trucks and contamination fees, but at the end of the day, how can you work to encourage people to participate,” Crawford Gay said. “That is where the recycling chain kind of starts is that consumer making that decision.”

The author is associate editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at cvoloschuk@gie.net.