Maine made history in 2021 when it became the first state to enact an Extended Producer Responsibility law.
Four years later, Maine’s EPR program is nearing implementation. Any business using packaging and shipping materials in Maine should familiarize itself with the compliance obligations and fees looming on the horizon.
What is EPR?
EPR is a policy framework that shifts the financial responsibility for managing packaging and shipping waste away from municipalities and taxpayers and onto the companies that introduce that packaging into Maine.
Under Maine’s Stewardship Program for Packaging Act, any company that qualifies as a “producer” will be required to:
- Register with a state-approved Stewardship Organization (the entity that will administer the program)
- Report annual data on the weight and type of packaging it supplies into Maine
- Pay fees based on that data.
Generally, a “producer” is the brand owner of products sold in Maine or, in some cases, the importer or private-label retailer.
Those fees will vary by material type, with flexible plastics carrying the highest rates and paper and fiber products carrying the lowest. Non-recyclable packaging and shipping materials will be charged at significantly higher rates than recyclable ones, creating a direct financial incentive to redesign packaging and restructure supply chains toward more recyclable forms.
What’s happening now
On June 15, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection issued a request for proposals to select a stewardship organization, with responses due Aug. 3. It is anticipated that businesses qualifying as producers will be required to register with the stewardship organization and begin reporting 2025 packaging and shipping data later this year, with the first fee invoices expected in 2027.
Assembling the packaging data that registration and reporting require (such as component weights by stock keeping units (SKUs) and state-level supply estimates) is not a quick exercise. Companies that wait for the stewardship organization to be selected before beginning their internal data gathering and analysis will likely find themselves playing catch-up.
How to prepare
A practical compliance process has four steps that every potential qualifying business should undertake now. They are as follows:
- Determine whether your company qualifies as a producer. Analyze Maine’s definition and whether you fall above or below the small-business exemption thresholds. Maine’s definition of producer captures brand owners, importers where no U.S. brand owner exists, and retailers selling under private labels. Getting the classification wrong can mean either paying fees you don’t owe or facing penalties for failing to register.
- Conduct a packaging audit. Catalog every covered material your business sells or ships in Maine, broken down by material type — such as rigid plastic, flexible plastic, glass, metal, paper and fiber, and composite materials — and by approximate weight.
- Fee modeling. Use your packaging audit data to estimate your annual fees under Maine’s program and identify which packaging formats are driving the highest costs. High-cost formats, particularly multi-layer flexible plastics and non-recyclable composites, are candidates for redesign before fees begin.
- Registration. Once Maine’s Stewardship Organization is selected, register promptly.
Do not wait
Maine businesses that treat EPR as a back-burner issue until the stewardship organization is named and invoices are issued will find themselves scrambling to meet deadlines with incomplete data and no opportunity to lower their costs through packaging redesign. The companies best positioned to manage EPR compliance at the lowest cost are those that begin their internal analysis now.
If your business sells branded products in Maine or ships products in packaging materials, the time to ask whether EPR applies to you is today. The law is here, the program is nearly operational, and preparation is the best strategy.
