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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. For a long time now, most of us have embraced recycling and made sure we use the proper bins for the proper items. In my house, it's green for trash and blue for recycling. And for a long time, our municipalities have charged us to take those items away to be recycled. But is that the way it really should be? After all, it's not cities and counties that produce the materials we need to recycle. In today's consumer ecosystem, most of the stuff that needs to be recycled comes from big e-commerce companies and their packaging.
Today on the show, you'll meet representatives from an organization that is successfully challenging the status quo here in Oregon over who pays for recycling, and so far they're winning in an effort to have producers of packaging pay to recycle their boxes, wrappings and containers: Dan Leif, director of policy implementation, and John Hite, senior director of public policy and government affairs, both with the Recycling Partnership.
Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
Dan Leif and John Hite: Great to be here.
Dunne: John, I'll start with you. Tell folks: What is the Oregon Recycling Modernization Act?
John Hite: Well, the full title is the Recycling Modernization Act, and it doesn't focus only on recycling. It focuses on end-of-life for packaging, which could mean recycling, reuse or refill. But the goal of the program is pretty simple: It's about fairness. It's about moving the costs of recycling away from local governments, who have historically been front and center in Oregon in ensuring recyclables are picked up from people's homes and brought to a recycling center for a second run through the economic system. It takes a lot of the costs to collect, sort and recycle that material and places them back onto the companies that put those packages on the market in the first place.
Dunne: OK, Dan, maybe you could explain to people why this is so important, and speak to the fact that this is a rather fundamental shift, isn't it?
Dan Leif: Yeah. This type of legislation is called, in policy terms, extended producer responsibility. As John noted, it's really a strategy to bring the large companies that use packaging and put it into the marketplace into sharing responsibility for managing that material, and to bring new funding to improve the statewide recycling system. That means things like creating a single, harmonized list of recyclables across the state, so it's more straightforward for residents, and bringing new funding to recycling facilities so they can innovate, handle material more efficiently and send it to markets in a more transparent manner.
This concept of producer funding for recycling has been in place in Europe and Canada, and over the last five years it's been exciting to see these laws start to pass in the United States. Oregon, true to its nature as a leader in sustainability and the environment, was the first U.S. state to roll out the program. It went live in July 2025, so we just completed our first year of extended producer responsibility policy in Oregon, where I'm proud to be a resident. It's been exciting to see the system grow and expand in this first year.
Dunne: Dan, stay with me. How has it been going in this first year? Are there any metrics you can talk about?
Leif: Yeah, a few exciting statistics have come out of the program in its first year. More than $30 million has been distributed to the recycling sorting facilities I mentioned, which take in collected recyclables from cities around Oregon, sort them and send them to market to be made into new products. Funding from producers under the law has also supported more than 36,000 new recycling carts and 11 recycling collection trucks out in communities to better collect this material across the state.
We've also seen more than 30 of what are called recycle-on centers open. These are drop-off centers managed by the producer organization Circular Action Alliance, the group that represents the producers obligated under the law. Part of the law requires them to open these collection points to collect items like plastic bags, plastic lids and shredded paper that haven't typically been part of curbside recycling but that we want to see collected. More than 30 of those centers have opened so far, mostly in rural areas, and over the course of this year we expect to see 50 or more open in areas like metro Portland and Lane County.
So it's been a great start, with a lot more to come. There have also been some complexities that come with an ambitious new law that's new for the producer set, and I can hand it over to John to talk about the lawsuit we've seen and a ruling just handed down a few days ago that's pretty important.
Dunne: OK, well, let's do that. John, why don't you pick it up from there?
Hite: Yeah. As Dan shared, we had some exciting news at the tail end of last week. As you can imagine, any time a new policy rolls out, there are growing pains in getting the program up and off the ground. All the different stakeholders need to understand how the program is changing their operations. Municipalities have to understand how the money is flowing, local consumers are seeing new educational materials, and from a producer standpoint, a couple of trade associations weren't thrilled with the new program and brought a constitutional challenge against it.
This is fairly standard for a new program in the U.S. Most new, large programs face some kind of legal challenge in their early days. The initial lawsuit was filed just a couple of days after the program went live last year, so at the usual snail's pace of the court system, it took about a year for a trial to take place. That trial happened in early July, and the judge was relatively speedy in reaching a decision, which was released last Thursday evening into Friday. We're thrilled to see that the judge clearly and resoundingly upheld the constitutionality of the EPR law. That means Oregon's program will be able to continue and keep rolling out. We'll have to see where things move in terms of potential appeals, but for now, it's a big green light for Oregon's EPR program.
Dunne: John, I want to stay with you for a second, because I'm wondering how we got to this point. My question is: Why weren't producers on the hook for funding, and why did it get shifted to municipalities all those years ago? How did that happen?
Hite: I haven't written the book on the full history of waste management. I'm sure someone out there has a full compendium on it, but I'd say our modern recycling system, as we know it, really began with an effort toward cleaner streets. Municipalities used tax dollars to fund waste management and collection to try to minimize dumping and trash in the streets. Out of that, in the '70s and '80s, around the first Earth Day, there was a lot of environmental activism and stewardship, and people in their local communities started picking up materials that could be recycled.
That has since developed into a significant business, as you can imagine, with pretty large municipal recycling programs. Cities now spend millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, putting trucks on the street to collect recyclables and send them off to be recycled. In the U.S., this has really been a municipality-centered operation. In Oregon, municipalities are actually compelled by state law to provide recycling, and that's been the case for several decades now.
But in the '90s and into the early 2000s, primarily in Europe, this new concept of extended producer responsibility started to take shape, coming out of academia first and then making its way into the policy space, in an effort to build the cost of managing waste back into product operations. You can think of it as the polluter-pays principle, but for end-of-life management of products and materials. We've got EPR laws around the world, including in the U.S., for all kinds of products: paint, mattresses, batteries, pharmaceuticals and more. But packaging has also come under the purview of these EPR policies. The first EPR-for-packaging laws began in the '90s in Europe, and the U.S., as we have on many environmental fronts, came to the party a little later but with no less enthusiasm. We now have seven U.S. states, including Oregon, that have decided to take these costs off municipalities and place them back into the packaging supply chain.
Dunne: Dan, my question here is: Obviously, the way we receive goods has changed fundamentally in the last few decades. I'm wondering, because of the incredible growth of e-commerce and platforms like Amazon, is that one of the big issues here? Is it that there's just so much more packaging now, because of the way we receive products, that it creates a situation where your organization has to get involved to change how things work?
Leif: Yeah, I think that's really astute, Michael. One of the reasons we've been moving toward requiring new funding mechanisms, and asking producers and brand companies to get engaged more directly and financially, is that the materials we're seeing in the packaging stream have evolved rapidly. Even before the e-commerce boom, we were seeing growth in different types of plastic packaging. One example that comes to mind is baby food, which was traditionally sold in glass jars. That's something most recycling systems were built to handle, and there were glass manufacturers near population centers in the U.S., so it was a pretty straightforward process to take the old material and create new material from it.
Now we see baby food in multi-material plastic packaging, the pouches you see on the grocery store shelf. There are benefits to that in terms of the weight of the package, the process of transporting it, some environmental factors and the ability to keep the food fresh longer. But the downside is that material is really hard to recycle. So what EPR laws are asking of producers that are leveraging this packaging and benefiting from it as they sell products into the marketplace is to help bring funding to the recycling system, to help us manage that material and innovate alongside the innovation in the packaging ecosystem itself, so we can responsibly recycle the materials coming our way into the consumer marketplace at an ever-faster and ever-evolving pace.
Dunne: OK. John, go ahead.
Hite: If I could jump in and add to what Dan shared, I think part of it is trying to align incentives toward innovation. In our current system in Oregon, with municipalities funding recycling and producers and brands putting packaging out on the market, there's really no economic signal coming back to producers about how to design their packaging. So when Dan described the transition of baby food from glass jars to flexible plastic film, the brands are ultimately trying to figure out the best way to get the product to the consumer, but they're not thinking about its end of life, because that's essentially a subsidized, publicly underwritten cost that municipalities currently pick up. A lot of that flexible film isn't collected for recycling, so it goes to disposal, and the town or city, through the ratepayer dollars Oregonians pay, funds that.
One of the core components of EPR is really connecting those economic signals back to the brands, so that through the fees they pay into the system, they understand which materials are more recyclable and which are less recyclable. That draws on the innovative power of the private sector to figure out whether packaging design needs to change to improve recyclability, or whether we need to invest in collection and recycling infrastructure so the material actually gets collected and recycled without a major packaging redesign. That's the very interesting process, for folks like Dan and me who are deep in this space, that's playing out as these programs take shape. All these decisions are being made among the brands, the compliance organization, the state and local governments to figure out exactly how those investments and innovations are starting to take form.
Dunne: You've just been listening to John Hite, senior director of public policy and government affairs, and also with us is Dan Leif, director of policy implementation, both with the Recycling Partnership. John, I'm going to stay with you, because people listening are probably asking: What's in it for me? What's in it for the ultimate consumer with these changes?
Hite: One of the goals is really to protect ratepayers. If you live in Oregon and pay a recycling and waste bill, one goal is to help stabilize that cost and, on the recycling side, to lower it. So there are direct cost savings for a ratepayer as you see your costs go down. But from a recycling performance perspective, a lot of people wonder: What's recyclable, what goes where? I know I have family and friends who face that question all the time, standing over the bin with different packages in hand.
One of the goals of the RMA, the EPR law and this new program in Oregon, is to standardize what's recyclable across the state, so no matter where you go, the same materials are considered recyclable, with signage and education to that effect, and so people know what isn't recyclable and should go in the trash. But it's not just about drawing a clear line between what's recyclable and what's not. It's also about making sure the list of what's considered recyclable grows over time. Ultimately, the goal of the program is to bring more materials into that system, so more of it gets a second life.
Leif: One of the great innovations the Oregon law brings to the recycling marketplace and the recycling system is an idea called responsible end markets. I know one of the concerns among a lot of people we talk to, who are just trying to do the right thing with their materials after they use them, is whether the material really gets reused or recycled into something new. We've seen a lot of media reports about materials we thought were being recycled that weren't, and that element of trust and concern, whether this stuff is really being made into new products, was a central component of the Recycling Modernization Act, Oregon's EPR law.
The law includes a provision requiring companies that buy recyclable materials out of Oregon to show they're doing the right thing with that material, that it's hitting the thresholds we want to see for turning into new products in a real and reliable way, and that there's transparency and data reporting. This is completely new to the recycling system, and it's an idea Oregon is putting on the map. Other states that have passed this type of policy have picked up on it and built it into their laws as well. Kudos to everyone at the state level and at Circular Action Alliance, the organization representing brands and producers. It's on them to build out this system that hasn't existed before, and they're doing that right now. It's very exciting.
Dunne: OK, John, you said seven states have passed similar legislation. Is the goal, is your hope, that all 50 states adopt it, and could this ever become a federal program as well?
Hite: If I had a crystal ball, I'd be able to tell you, but I don't. I can say there have been proposals put forward at the federal level, including a current proposal from Rep. Tonko of New York, but for now we see that as a north star and a guide for states as they think through what their EPR framework might look like. We'll continue to have conversations at the federal level to keep educating representatives and senators about the importance of smart recycling policy. We also have other federal policies, including a fairly comprehensive recycling tax credit, the Circle Act, that we think may have more near-term success. EPR is always out there, and we'll keep moving in that direction.
Michael Dunne: You've been listening to Dan Leif, director of policy implementation, and John Hite, senior director of public policy and government affairs, with the Recycling Partnership. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us.
Leif and Hite: Absolutely, a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much, Michael.
Michael Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear from a national reporter about claims that Oregon policymakers are hiding the true cost of affordable housing in the state. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
