CHICAGO, June 15, 2026 — Don’t erase Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) from your worry list just yet.
Since Colorado put a fee system in place at the start of the year, little has happened in the state-by-state drive to make packaging manufacturers and their wholesale clients pay for the collection of used food containers, wrappers and shipping materials.
But the quest to shift the collection expense from local and state governments to businesses that use the packaging is still very much underway.
The movement will hit a milestone on Jan. 1 when California’s program is put into action. The state is the nation’s largest food-away-from-home market and often the spark for legislative and regulatory activity in other regions.
At least 14 other states are already considering EPR legislation. Handicappers say the most likely to join the seven states with EPR laws already on the books are New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia and Rhode Island. There’s more than a 70% chance the legislatures of those jurisdictions will pass some sort of EPR legislation, according to Capstone, a firm that advises corporations on regulatory issues.
Research or hearings on the issue are underway in nine more states: Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Connecticut, Hawaii, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri and New Hampshire. Capstone pegs the chances of EPR measures being adopted by those states as ranging from 20% to 60%.
In a positive for the food-away-from-home business, potential new adopters like New York are using the program being developed for California and the set-up already in place in Minneapolis as models instead of creating something from scratch. A frustration for food-away-from-home businesses in the seven states where EPR is already a reality is the variation in the specific mandates. Restaurant chains in particular have complained that they essentially have to meet a different set of requirements in each.
Some FAFH companies operating in multiple states with EPR programs in place say they’d prefer one national mandate over a patchwork of requirements. But no comprehensive federal bill is known to be currently alive in Congress.
Without an umbrella law, chain operators are contending with different set-ups in the seven states that have taken the plunge: Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and California, which is currently in the phase-in stage. Maine, the first to embrace EPR, has already adjusted its law.
The Foodservice Packaging Institute, a group that promotes and protects the interests of FAFH packaging suppliers and users, lists EPR as the first item on its list of advocacy priorities.