What counts as "packaging," and who counts as a "producer"?¶
Every packaging EPR system begins with two definitional acts: deciding what materials are obligated, and deciding which company in the supply chain must answer for them. Both look technical and both are deeply consequential — the definition of "packaging" determines how many millions of tonnes the system covers, and the producer hierarchy determines which of several plausible companies receives the bill for any given item. This article reviews the packaging definitions in force across Europe, Canada and the United States, including the expansions (paper products, "packaging-like products," food serviceware) that make nominally similar programs materially different; the producer hierarchies that assign the obligation; and the e-commerce and marketplace rules that represent the definitional frontier.
1. Why definitions are where the money is decided¶
Definitional questions in EPR are distributional questions. Whether transport pallets are in or out changes the fee base by large fractions; whether a paper coffee cup is "packaging," "food serviceware," or a "packaging-like product" determines who pays for it and against which target it counts; whether the obligated producer is the brand owner or the importer determines whether the obligation lands on a multinational or on a small distributor. Because these decisions are made in definitions rather than in headline provisions, they receive a fraction of the scrutiny given to targets and fees while allocating comparable sums.
The definitions also determine comparability. As this article shows, "packaging EPR" in Oregon obligates newspapers; in California it does not; in Ontario it obligates aluminium foil sold as a product; in the EU it obligates industrial transport packaging that no North American program touches. Cross-jurisdictional comparisons of program cost or performance that ignore these scope differences compare different systems under one name.
2. The European baseline: three layers of packaging¶
The reference definition is European. Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste — the 1994 directive that still frames EU packaging law — defines packaging through its function (containment, protection, handling, delivery and presentation of goods) and divides it into three layers: sales packaging (primary — the wrapper around the product); grouped packaging (secondary — the collation around multiple sales units); and transport packaging (tertiary — pallets, shrink-wrap and shipping containers used to move goods in bulk). The directive notably does not define "producer" for EPR purposes: its Article 3 defines packaging, packaging waste and "economic operators," but the assignment of obligation was left to member states until the 2018 amendments required EPR schemes for all packaging by the end of 2024.
The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2025/40, the PPWR), which replaces the directive with directly applicable law, closes that gap. Its producer definition (Article 3) attaches the obligation to the party that first makes a unit of packaging available in the member state where it becomes waste — whether manufacturer, importer or distributor — with a mandatory authorised representative for producers not established in that member state. The scope remains all three packaging layers, from industry, retail, services and households alike. This all-packaging scope is the single largest structural difference between European and North American packaging EPR, examined in the streams article.
3. The North American definitions: narrower base, novel extensions¶
Ontario operates the most instructively drafted definition in North America, because it names the categories other jurisdictions leave implicit. Under O. Reg. 391/21, as restated in the guidance of the provincial regulator (the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority, RPRA), "Blue Box material" spans three families. Product packaging includes primary, transport and convenience packaging, plus service accessories — items "supplied with a food or beverage product [that] facilitate the consumption of that food or beverage product and are ordinarily disposed of after a single use," such as straws, cutlery and plates. Paper products cover printed and unprinted paper — newspapers, magazines, greeting cards, calendars. And packaging-like products — Ontario's distinctive contribution to the definitional art — capture items sold as products that function like packaging and are "ordinarily disposed of after a single use": aluminium foil, metal trays, plastic film and wrap, wrapping paper, paper bags, beverage cups, cardboard boxes and envelopes purchased empty. The insight behind the category is sound: a roll of foil and the foil around a supermarket lasagne end up in the same bin, and a system that obligates one but not the other invites both unfairness and misreporting.
California's SB 54 defines "covered material" as single-use packaging "routinely recycled, disposed of, or discarded after its contents have been used or unpackaged," plus plastic single-use food service ware (including plastic-coated paper). Printed paper is outside scope entirely — SB 54 is a packaging-only law — and the exclusions are product-based (medical products, drugs, infant formula) rather than channel-based.
Oregon's Recycling Modernization Act defines "covered products" as packaging, food serviceware, and printing and writing paper — expressly including newspapers, magazines, catalogues and office paper, the broadest paper scope in the United States (the printed paper article). Its exclusions are instructive on the business-to-business boundary: specialty packaging used exclusively in industrial or manufacturing processes, component-part transport trays, and pallet wrap added by a party other than the producer.
Quebec structures its scope as three named families — containers, packaging and printed matter (contenants, emballages et imprimés) — under its selective-collection regulation (CQLR c. Q-2, r. 46.01), with separate producer-designation rules for each and dedicated provisions (sections 5 and 9) assigning responsibility for online sales depending on whether the website operator or the seller controls the transaction. British Columbia's Schedule 5 pairs packaging with the most comprehensively enumerated paper scope in North America — flyers, brochures, catalogues, directories, newspapers, magazines, copying and writing paper — while excluding bound reference, literary and text books.
The common exclusion across nearly all programs is bound books — excluded in British Columbia, Colorado, Minnesota and Maryland alike — a recognition that a durable, retained product is not functionally packaging even though it is paper. Oregon adds absorbent papers to its exclusions; California carves out on-site agricultural producers packaging their own commodities where grown. Each exclusion looks minor, and each defines a constituency that does not pay.
4. Who is the producer: the hierarchy¶
No packaging item identifies its own obligated party; statutes therefore construct a cascade — an ordered list of candidates, with the obligation landing on the first that exists for a given product. Ontario's cascade, as stated by RPRA, is the fullest worked example:
- The brand holder of the product, if resident in Canada;
- failing that, the Ontario-resident importer of the product;
- failing that, the retailer that supplied the product directly to Ontario consumers;
- where that retailer is a marketplace seller, the marketplace facilitator is the obligated producer;
- for franchises, the franchisor is the producer for its Ontario franchisees.
California's SB 54 hierarchy (Public Resources Code §42041(w)) runs in the same spirit: first, the manufacturer of the product that owns or licenses the brand; failing that, the brand owner or its exclusive in-state licensee; failing that, the person who sells or distributes the product into the state — with a carve-out for on-site agricultural producers packaging their own commodities where grown. Quebec's regulation (CQLR c. Q-2, r. 46.01) assigns the obligation to the brand owner with a Quebec domicile or establishment, falling back to the first supplier in Quebec, with dedicated provisions for online sales. Oregon assigns publications to their publisher and other covered products through a brand-manufacturer/importer cascade.
Three design points deserve emphasis. First, the cascades are residence-driven: the brand owner is preferred, but only if it has a local presence the regulator can reach — otherwise the obligation rolls downhill to whoever is reachable. Second, the cascades embed the design-control rationale for EPR (Theme 1): the brand holder is first in line because it is the party that specifies the packaging. When the obligation lands on an importer or retailer instead, the payer and the design-controller separate — and the design-incentive logic of the instrument weakens accordingly. Third, the hierarchy determines who counts producers: Ontario's registry counted only 1,918 registered Blue Box producers as of April 2025, and how many obligated parties that figure misses depends entirely on how the cascade maps onto real supply chains (the free-riding discussion).
5. Germany: the maximal answer to "who must register"¶
Germany's Packaging Act (VerpackG) answers the producer question with the broadest net in the field, and its register authority — the Zentrale Stelle Verpackungsregister (ZSVR) — states the rule plainly: every company that commercially distributes packaged goods on the German market or imports them into Germany must register in the LUCID packaging register, "regardless of where in the world that company is based." And, in the ZSVR's exact words: "If you are operating commercially, there is no de minimis threshold or exemption for companies with low packaging volumes." A sole trader shipping a handful of parcels is, formally, as registrable as a multinational.
Germany also pioneered the marketplace rule that other jurisdictions are converging toward: since July 2022, electronic marketplaces are required by law to verify that third-party sellers have registered with LUCID and concluded a system participation agreement, and may not enable sales by non-compliant sellers — checkable against the public producer register. This converts the platforms from an enforcement gap into an enforcement instrument: the marketplace, which has the commercial relationship and the data, polices the long tail of small and foreign sellers that no regulator could reach individually. Ontario's marketplace-facilitator rule reaches a similar destination by a different route — making the platform itself the obligated producer for marketplace sellers — and the EU's PPWR carries online-platform verification duties into directly applicable European law. The e-commerce parcel stream, which did not exist when the original definitions were written, is thus the definitional frontier: the jurisdictions that have addressed it did so by recruiting or obligating the platforms.
6. Comparison and consequences¶
| Jurisdiction | "Packaging" scope | Paper products? | Distinctive feature | Producer (first in cascade) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EU (PPWR) | All three layers, all channels | Not as products | Directly applicable; authorised-representative requirement | First making available in the member state |
| Germany | System-participation (household-type) packaging via dual systems; transport via take-back | No | No de minimis; marketplace verification duty | First distributor of packaged goods |
| Ontario | Primary, transport, convenience + service accessories | Yes | "Packaging-like products" category | Canadian-resident brand holder |
| Quebec | Containers, packaging and printed matter | Yes | Online-sales provisions | Brand owner with Quebec establishment |
| California | Single-use packaging + plastic food service ware | No | Product-based exclusions | Brand-owning manufacturer |
| Oregon | Packaging + food serviceware + printing/writing paper | Yes (incl. newspapers) | Broadest US paper scope; B2B carve-outs | Brand manufacturer; publisher for publications |
Three conclusions follow for any reader of program comparisons. First, scope differences of this size swamp performance differences: a program obligating all packaging plus paper is running a different system, at different cost, from one obligating single-use consumer packaging alone, and per-tonne or per-capita comparisons between them are close to meaningless without adjustment. Second, the definitional layer is where free-riding is created or prevented: a cascade that reaches marketplaces and foreign sellers (Germany, Ontario) closes by design the gap that enforcement would otherwise have to close case by case — and the jurisdictions whose registries undercount obligated producers are generally those whose cascades stop at parties the regulator cannot see. Third, definitional divergence is itself a compliance cost: a producer selling identical products across the seven US states, three of which include printed paper and four of which do not, with seven different exclusion lists and small-producer tests, must classify the same package seven ways — the documented burden of the first US consolidated reporting round, in which producers filed up to eight separate reports across six states, is substantially a definitional burden.
The cross-border reach of the cascades deserves a closing observation, because it is where the definitional and enforcement layers meet. The PPWR requires producers not established in the member state where they first make packaging available to appoint an authorised representative — importing into packaging law the device EU product regulation uses to give regulators a domestic party to hold responsible for foreign sellers. Germany's registration duty applies "regardless of where in the world that company is based," enforced through the marketplace verification obligation. Ontario reaches foreign brands through the importer and marketplace-facilitator tiers. The pattern across all three: definitions are being redrafted so that, for every unit of packaging, there exists at least one party inside the regulator's jurisdiction who can be made to answer for it. Definitional drafting, in short, is not preliminary to the policy; it is the policy, applied at the point where it decides who pays.
References¶
- Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste, Art. 3 (consolidated text) — the sales/grouped/transport structure; no producer definition.
- Regulation (EU) 2025/40 (PPWR), Art. 3 (producer and manufacturer definitions) and producer-registration provisions; as restated in guidance by the ZSVR and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Letter-perfect wording of Art. 3(1)(15) not independently captured; substance verified across two official restatements.
- O. Reg. 391/21 (Ontario Blue Box), as restated in RPRA guidance: producer hierarchy, Blue Box material categories, packaging-like products and service accessories (rpra.ca, accessed August 2026). Regulation section numbers not independently verified; e-Laws access restricted.
- California Public Resources Code §42041 — covered material and the §42041(w) producer cascade.
- ORS 459A.863 and 459A.866 (Oregon) — covered products, exclusions, and producer assignment including publishers.
- CQLR c. Q-2, r. 46.01 (Quebec), ss. 3–10 — producer designation for containers, packaging and printed matter.
- VerpackG (Germany); ZSVR official guidance on registration, the absence of a de minimis threshold, and marketplace verification duties (verpackungsregister.org, accessed August 2026).
- B.C. Reg. 449/2004, Schedule 5 — the BC packaging and paper product definition and book exclusion.
Verification note: this article rests on the August 2026 research pass logged in Sources and method; facts drawn from regulator restatements rather than primary statutory text are identified as such, and access restrictions encountered on primary portals (e-Laws, EUR-Lex full text) are disclosed rather than papered over.