Why does industry sometimes support EPR?¶
Extended producer responsibility imposes a cost on producers that they did not previously bear. On the simplest model of corporate behaviour, producers should oppose it uniformly and everywhere. They do not. Some of the largest packaging users in the world have publicly and repeatedly called for mandatory, fee-based EPR — and have done so in terms specific enough to be quoted, dated and held against them. At the same time, other parts of the same industry have sued four states, killed a bill in New York twice, and denied that EPR should apply to their material at all.
This article sets out what industry has actually said, on the record; which conditions it attaches to its support; which motives are documented and which are inference; where and why parts of industry have opposed EPR; and what the political-economy literature does — and conspicuously does not — offer by way of explanation. The disciplinary point that governs the whole article is a distinction that is easy to lose: what a firm says, what a journalist says it said, and what a commentator infers about its motives are three different kinds of evidence, and only the first is a fact about the firm.
1. What industry has actually said¶
The strongest single artefact is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Extended Producer Responsibility Statement, published on 21 October 2022 and signed by more than two hundred organisations. Its central commitment is that "all industry players introducing packaging to the market provide funding dedicated to collecting and processing their packaging after its use," and it describes mandatory, fee-based EPR schemes as "the only proven and likely pathway" to fund packaging collection and recycling at scale. The signatory list is not marginal: it includes The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Danone, Mars, L'Oréal, Walmart and H&M Group, alongside packaging manufacturers, investors and NGOs.
Read carefully, the statement is more demanding than a general endorsement. It asks that funding be dedicated (ring-fenced), ongoing (guaranteed rather than annually negotiated), and sufficient to execute a defined scope — three conditions that, if actually enforced, would constrain governments more than producers. It is also notably permissive on the questions this library treats as contested: it does not prescribe eco-modulation, does not prescribe producer governance of the compliance body, and does not prescribe deposit-return. Those are presented as design choices, not requirements.
In the United States, the two most consistently on-record bodies are AMERIPEN (the American Institute for Packaging and the Environment) and the Consumer Brands Association.
AMERIPEN's support is explicitly conditional, and its conditions are visible in what it endorses and what it opposes. Its 2023 testimony to the New York State Senate opposed statutory recycling and reduction mandates set before a needs assessment, opposed 100% cost reimbursement from producers to municipalities in favour of shared responsibility, opposed folding chemical or material bans into EPR bills, and opposed creating oversight bodies duplicating existing environmental agencies. When it endorsed Minnesota's law in May 2024, its executive director Dan Felton called it "a fair compromise that establishes a model of shared responsibility and is aligned with AMERIPEN's key principles" — and AMERIPEN's own framing credited the law with avoiding arbitrary recycling targets, avoiding commercial-sector cost coverage, and avoiding unrelated packaging-composition requirements. The endorsement was of a bill defined substantially by what it left out.
The Consumer Brands Association is blunter on the question this library regards as central. Its published EPR position asks that programmes "standardize recycling programs and definitions across a state, region and ultimately, nationally"; that they rest on "accurate data and science, including a needs assessment with clear financial and performance targets"; that consumers "don't bear the undue burden of added costs" — and, critically, that the compliance body be "an industry-funded and -run producer responsibility organization."
That last phrase deserves to be read twice. It is the clearest documented statement anywhere that a major industry body regards producer control of the PRO not as an incidental feature of EPR but as a condition of supporting it. Everything this library documents in Theme 2 about the structural conflicts built into producer-governed compliance bodies — and everything now being litigated in the United States about private bodies exercising public authority (the litigation article) — concerns a design feature that industry has publicly asked for.
Individual companies add texture. PepsiCo has described itself as a "strong supporter" of "well-constructed" EPR programmes, noting that it "participates in EPR programs throughout the world and has learned through years of experience how to maximize program efficiency and strong environmental outcomes," and recommending harmonised approaches across federal agencies. The American Beverage Association has endorsed EPR as "a producer-run model that shifts the onus of residential recycling from taxpayers and municipalities to the producers who put packaging and printed paper on the market."
2. The harmonisation motive, which is the best-evidenced of all¶
Of the motives commonly ascribed to industry, one is documented far more robustly than the others, by multiple named individuals at unrelated organisations converging independently on the same complaint.
AMERIPEN's Lynn Dyer: "If the materials are not the same across the different states, that gets just very difficult and challenging for the producers," and inefficiency "is going to lead to higher costs, which is certainly not going to be a very effective system." The Consumer Brands Association asking for standardisation "across a state, region and ultimately, nationally." PepsiCo asking for harmonised approaches across agencies. The US Plastics Pact: "harmonization of core elements such as definitions, scope, and performance metrics is essential to reduce complexity and administrative burden." Circular Action Alliance — the compliance body itself, and so an implementer's rather than a payer's voice — pledging to pursue "the greatest harmonization, to the greatest extent possible."
The material basis for this is set out in the US article: eight separate reports across six states in the first consolidated reporting round, seven different small-producer thresholds, five different answers to whether printed paper is covered. The fragmentation is real, it is expensive, and it is not the product of any deliberate policy choice — it is what happens when seven legislatures write on the same subject without coordinating.
This motive is worth taking seriously precisely because it is banal. It requires no theory of strategic behaviour. A firm selling identical products into fifty states prefers one rulebook to seven, and will support the instrument likeliest to produce one. It also explains a pattern that a pure cost-minimisation account cannot: why industry support is strongest for national frameworks and weakest for individual state bills, which is exactly the pattern the record shows.
3. The preemption motive, and the limit of the evidence¶
The more interesting hypothesis is that industry supports EPR because it forestalls something worse. Here the evidence is real but must be handled with care, because a documented preference is not a documented strategy.
What is documented is the preference, and it is explicit. On deposit-return systems, PepsiCo's David Allen: "EPR offers a more comprehensive, flexible, and cost-effective approach to improving packaging collection and recycling." Keurig Dr Pepper's Charlie Schwarze: "While deposit return systems may play a very useful role in addition to EPR programs by boosting specific collection of beverage containers, we favor well-designed EPR programs." The American Beverage Association's Megan Daum: "Deposit systems focus only on a small portion of the consumer packaging and printed paper recycling and waste streams." Not everyone agrees — Primo Brands has argued that "EPR and DRS together will foster an optimized recycling collection system" — but the sector's centre of gravity is clear, and it matters because deposit systems impose costs on beverage producers that packaging EPR spreads across all producers (the interaction analysis).
The clearest case of an alternative instrument shaping industry's posture is California. In June 2022 the American Chemistry Council said of SB 54 that "although ACC was actively participating in SB 54 discussions, after careful review of the final legislation we believe it is not the optimal legislation to drive California towards a circular economy" — a qualified non-endorsement — while pledging to "work constructively with lawmakers and CalRecycle to support appropriate implementation." In the same statement it attacked the competing 2022 ballot initiative in far stronger terms, saying it would "raise consumer costs by nearly $9 billion annually," calling on proponents to "withdraw the ballot," and warning that "if it is not withdrawn, our industry is resolved to educate voters of the tax measure's flaws through a strong opposition campaign."
One actor, one document, two instruments, sharply different intensities of opposition. That is the structure of a preemption dynamic.
But it must be labelled correctly. No company or association located for this article has said that it supports EPR in order to prevent a bottle bill, a packaging tax, a recycled-content mandate or a stricter treaty from passing. The preference is on the record; the strategic intent is not. A reader is entitled to draw the inference — the sequence of statements supports it — but the inference belongs to the reader or the analyst, not to the firms, and this library will not attribute to an organisation a motive it has not stated.
4. Where industry opposed — and the split that explains it¶
The industry-supports-EPR story collapses immediately on contact with the record unless one asks which industry.
Paper. The American Forest & Paper Association opposes EPR for paper products outright: "EPR programs ultimately increase costs for American families without improving paper recycling," and "the success of our industry-led paper recycling initiative, consistently high recycling rates and the industry's ongoing efforts to promote voluntary recycling show EPR is not the right approach for paper." It sought to intervene in the Oregon litigation — a motion denied as untimely in March 2026 — with its president Heidi Brock citing "higher-than-anticipated fees, expanded reporting, compliance obligations" imposing "significant and unnecessary burdens on paper products." A sector with a high pre-existing voluntary recovery rate has the strongest possible argument that EPR charges it for a problem it has already solved, and it makes that argument consistently (the printed paper article).
Wholesaler-distributors. The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors states its position with unusual precision: "While supportive of the goals of circularity, NAW does not support EPR laws that regulate or tax a product at the wholesaler-distributor level of the supply chain," because "many EPR laws shift the burden away from these key decision-makers and enact mandates and fines on parts of the supply chain that have little to no control over decisions to design, reduce, reuse or recycle a product." Its chief government relations officer Brian Wild puts it in one sentence: "Manufacturers and brands get to choose what materials go into their packaging, but distributors do not."
Specific bills, by firms that support EPR generally. The Flexible Packaging Association opposed New York's revised legislation in April 2026 on the ground that the bill "prohibit[s] the most effective methods for processing flexible plastic packaging while simultaneously requiring a 30% reduction in that same packaging," creating "an extremely challenging compliance landscape" — an internal-contradiction argument rather than an objection to producer responsibility as such. And per Beyond Plastics' own lobbying analysis — an advocacy source, and its "David vs. Goliath" framing signals as much — 106 businesses lobbied against the New York bill in the first half of 2025 against 24 in support, with Amazon, ExxonMobil, McDonald's, Shell and Coca-Cola named as opponents. Coca-Cola's appearance on that list, alongside its signature on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation statement, is the single sharpest illustration of the pattern. It should be noted that no Coca-Cola statement explaining its position on that specific bill was located, so its reasons are unknown rather than inconsistent.
Small publishers. The Greeting Card Association objects to paper products being drawn into EPR, worrying that revenue-threshold exemptions "can be reduced in future years" and objecting to greeting cards being characterised alongside "junk mail that immediately goes into the recycling bin."
The organising insight is NAW's. Support for EPR tracks control over packaging design. Brand owners, who choose materials and can respond to a fee signal, support EPR conditionally and ask to govern the body that sets the fees. Distributors, who choose nothing and can respond to nothing, oppose it and litigate. Paper, which operates a functioning parallel system, wants out. This is not hypocrisy; it is a coherent map of who can convert a fee into a decision and who can only convert it into a cost.
5. What the political-economy literature offers, and the gap where its application should be¶
There is a large and distinguished literature on why regulated firms sometimes want regulation, and the article would be incomplete without it — but it must be cited accurately, and its relationship to EPR stated honestly.
George Stigler, "The Theory of Economic Regulation" (Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 1971, 2(1): 3–21), founded the modern economic theory of regulation: that regulation is often acquired by an industry and operated for its benefit. Bruce Yandle's "Bootleggers and Baptists" (Regulation, 1983) supplied the field's most durable metaphor — that durable regulation typically pairs a moral constituency with a material one, each supplying what the other lacks. Salop and Scheffman, "Raising Rivals' Costs" (American Economic Review, 1983, 73(2): 267–271), formalised the mechanism by which a firm can profit from a cost imposed on the whole industry if it bears that cost more lightly than its competitors — the obvious application being large producers with compliance departments versus small ones without. Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1965) explains why concentrated interests organise more effectively than diffuse ones, which is why a few dozen large brands can hold a common position while households cannot. And Lyon and Maxwell have built a body of work on voluntary environmental agreements and corporate self-regulation as responses to the threat of stricter mandatory regulation.
Every one of those propositions has an evident application to packaging EPR. A cost imposed on all producers, administered by a body the largest producers found and govern, with a small-producer exemption that concentrates the burden on mid-sized firms — this is close to a textbook configuration for the raising-rivals'-costs and capture literatures, and it is precisely the configuration the equal-protection claim in the Oregon litigation alleged before that claim was dismissed.
But no peer-reviewed article applying this literature to extended producer responsibility or packaging policy could be located. The EPR economics literature is real and substantial, and it is about something else: instrument design, incentive structure, whether fees reach the design decision. Margaret Walls's work on EPR and product design, the OECD's economic analyses, the recent Environmental and Resource Economics work on packaging waste reduction and eco-design — all of it addresses how EPR should be built, none of it addresses who wants it built and why.
This is a genuine hole in the field, and it is worth naming as one. The political economy of EPR is currently written by trade press, advocacy organisations and litigants, none of whom are disinterested. Any claim that "scholars have shown industry supports EPR as a bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition" would be false. The correct statement is that the theoretical apparatus for analysing that question is well developed, has not been applied here, and would repay the effort.
6. Where the argument stands¶
Five conclusions are supportable on the record assembled here.
Industry support for EPR is real, documented and conditional. It is not a rhetorical pose: over two hundred organisations signed a statement calling for mandatory fee-based schemes, and the largest packaging users in the world are among them. But every substantial endorsement carries conditions, and the conditions are consistent — harmonised definitions, data-led rather than statutory targets, shared rather than total cost coverage, no unrelated riders, and a producer-run compliance body.
The harmonisation motive is the best-evidenced and needs no strategic interpretation. Fragmentation is expensive, the expense is documented, and the preference for one rulebook follows without any theory of concealed intent.
The preemption motive is visible in behaviour and absent from testimony. The beverage sector's stated preference for EPR over deposit-return is on the record; the American Chemistry Council's sharply differentiated treatment of SB 54 and the competing ballot measure is on the record. What is not on the record is any admission that support for one instrument is a strategy against another — and the distinction must be preserved.
Position tracks design control, not sector sentiment. The cleanest predictor of whether a firm supports packaging EPR is whether it chooses the packaging. This explains the brand-owner/distributor split, the paper industry's separate posture, and why the same company can sign a global EPR statement and lobby against a state bill without inconsistency.
And the field has no independent scholarship on any of this. For a policy instrument that now moves billions of dollars a year through bodies that industry asked to control, the absence of peer-reviewed political-economy analysis is a more serious gap than any of the empirical uncertainties Theme 6 documents — because it is the gap that determines whose account of the others gets believed.
References¶
- Industry positions: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Extended Producer Responsibility: Statement and Position Paper (21 October 2022), including the "only proven and likely pathway" language and the signatory list; Consumer Brands Association, published EPR position (the "industry-funded and -run producer responsibility organization" condition); AMERIPEN testimony to the New York State Senate (24 October 2023) and its statement supporting Minnesota's legislation (20 May 2024, quoting executive director Dan Felton); National Confectioners Association EPR principles.
- Company and sector statements: PepsiCo and the American Beverage Association as reported in Packaging Dive's coverage of responses to the EPA draft plastic pollution prevention strategy (11 August 2023); PepsiCo (David Allen), Keurig Dr Pepper (Charlie Schwarze), the American Beverage Association (Megan Daum) and Primo Brands on EPR versus deposit-return, as reported by Packaging Digest (June 2025). These beverage-sector quotations are reported from trade coverage of a panel rather than from a transcript, and are flagged accordingly.
- Harmonisation: AMERIPEN (Lynn Dyer; Danielle Waterfield), the US Plastics Pact and Circular Action Alliance (Shane Buckingham), as reported by Packaging Dive (5 and 22 December 2025).
- The preemption evidence: American Chemistry Council, statement on SB 54 and the 2022 ballot measure (29 June 2022) — both the qualified non-endorsement of the statute and the far stronger opposition to the ballot initiative appear in the same document.
- Opposition: American Forest & Paper Association, EPR priorities page, and Heidi Brock's statement on the denied Oregon intervention (March 2026); National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, NAW Position on Packaging and Paper EPR Laws, and Brian Wild's statement on design control; Flexible Packaging Association opposition to the revised New York legislation (27 April 2026); Greeting Card Association EPR position (June 2025); Beyond Plastics, Follow the Money (October 2025) — an advocacy publication, and its lobbying figures and opponent list rest on its own compilation rather than on the New York State lobbying disclosures, which were not consulted.
- Political economy: Stigler, G. (1971), "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2(1): 3–21; Yandle, B. (1983), "Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist," Regulation (exact pagination not confirmed against a primary source); Salop, S. and Scheffman, D. (1983), "Raising Rivals' Costs," American Economic Review 73(2): 267–271; Olson, M. (1965), The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press; Lyon, T. and Maxwell, J., work on voluntary environmental agreements and corporate self-regulation (titles and authorship verified; findings not read for this article and therefore not characterised).
- The absence finding: searches for peer-reviewed work applying Stigler-style capture theory, bootleggers-and-Baptists analysis or raising-rivals'-costs theory specifically to extended producer responsibility or packaging policy returned nothing. The EPR economics literature located (Walls on EPR and product design; OECD, Economic Aspects of Extended Producer Responsibility, 2004; Environmental and Resource Economics 83(3), 2022) is design- and incentive-focused and does not address industry political economy.
Verification note: all quotations above are reproduced from the sources named and are attributed only to the speaker and document in which they were found. Where a quotation reached this article through trade-press reporting rather than a primary transcript or filing, that is stated. No motive is attributed to any organisation that the organisation has not stated in its own words; the preemption reading in Section 3 is identified as inference. Coca-Cola's reported opposition to the New York bill is recorded without explanation because no statement of its reasons was located. See Sources and method.