Should printed paper be in the program?¶
Printed paper — newspapers, magazines, flyers, catalogues, office paper — travels in the same bin, the same truck and the same sorting facility as packaging, which is why many jurisdictions fold it into packaging EPR. It is also the product of an industry with a distinctive political claim: that newsprint is not packaging but civic infrastructure, and that charging newspapers for recycling taxes journalism. The result is the most consistent pattern of sectoral exemption in the EPR field. This article maps who obligates printed paper and who exempts it; the recurring compromise instrument — payment in advertising space rather than cash — that has appeared independently in at least five jurisdictions; the French reform that tested whether in-kind arrangements survive EU law; and the unmeasured question underneath: who picks up the cost when the newspapers leave.
1. The case for inclusion, and the shrinking object of the fight¶
The inclusion logic is physical and fiscal. Printed paper is collected in the identical residential stream as packaging; a program that excludes it still collects it, and its costs flow to whoever remains obligated. Historically the tonnage was enormous — newsprint was the original backbone of residential recycling, and in Ontario newsprint alone was 55% of Blue Box tonnage as recently as 2010. It is also, by any measure, one of the most successfully recycled materials in the stream.
But the object of the fight is shrinking fast. US federal data show newspaper generation falling from 14.8 million tons in 2000 to about 5 million tons by 2018; Ontario newsprint fell from 55% of Blue Box tonnage in 2010 to 23% by 2020 (as reported by the paper packaging industry association PPEC); Quebec's newspaper body puts print media below 2% of the modernised system's costs. The decline cuts both ways in argument: exemption advocates say the tonnage is now too small to matter; inclusion advocates reply that if it is too small to matter, it is too small to justify special treatment.
2. Canada: three provinces, three settlements¶
British Columbia: the in-kind deal. BC's Recycling Regulation covers paper products comprehensively — newspapers, magazines, flyers, directories, office paper — excluding only bound books. When packaging-and-paper EPR arrived, major newspaper groups refused to pay fees to the producer organisation, and the province issued warning notices in 2016. The settlement, approved in October 2017, is distinctive: News Media Canada operates its own approved stewardship plan under which newspapers pay nothing in cash — publishers provide in-kind advertising space to the provincial government, and the government maintains the relationship with Recycle BC, which physically collects the material. The industry's own annual report describes the mechanism plainly: newsprint "is integrated into the province-wide Recycle BC program... made possible through NMC's delivery of in-kind advertising to the BC Government." Roughly 16,500 tonnes of member newsprint and magazines moved through the arrangement in 2019, with reported recovery rates above 90%. Annual reports continue through 2025; formal confirmation of the arrangement's status in 2026 was not located.
Ontario: the statutory exemption. Ontario's Blue Box regulation obligates paper products including newspapers — but a 2022 amendment created an exemption whose current form, per the regulator RPRA, is: a producer is exempt from all collection, management and promotion obligations if newspaper accounts for more than 70% of its total Blue Box supply in a calendar year. Exempt producers must still register and report supply data. The newspapers remain in the Blue Box and are collected; exempt producers simply do not pay for them. The government justified the exemption on "the vital public service role newspapers play in the communities" (as reported in legal commentary, which also noted the amendment was made without posting under the Environmental Bill of Rights); the newspaper associations applauded — News Media Canada's president stating that "newspapers are not packaging and should be exempt," the community newspaper association that "we've never viewed ourselves as the same as the tin can or the plastic wrap people of the world." The exemption's cost lands on the remaining producers, whose material shares the truck. Ontario's earlier history rhymes: under the pre-EPR Blue Box, newspapers paid their industry share through in-kind advertising from 2000.
Quebec: the state pays, then the fight reopens. Quebec's old compensation regime handled newspapers through RecycleMédias, a certified body whose tariff could be satisfied in cash or in municipal advertising space — and whose cash rates tell the story of the sector's rising exposure: from $3.45 per tonne in 2010 to $335.55 in 2021. From 2019, the provincial government effectively took over the newspapers' bill as part of its media-aid package, granting RecycleMédias $28.5 million cumulatively by 2022 — an explicit fiscalisation of the industry's EPR obligation, justified as preserving press independence. The modernised system (from January 2025) obligates printed matter with no newspaper exemption — and the fight promptly reopened: RecycleMédias' pre-budget submission asked for a full "cultural exemption" on the Ontario model, and in February 2026 a coalition of Quebec newspapers and magazines published an open letter demanding cancellation of the "abusive tariffs," arguing that taxing newsprint "is taxing content with fundamental value for society." Magazine publishers, who received no equivalent state aid while their fees roughly doubled, demanded parity. The dispute was unresolved at the time of writing.
3. The United States: the exemption spreads by template¶
The seven US packaging EPR states split three ways, and the drafting history is visible in the statutory language.
| State | Printed paper covered? | Newspaper treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Oregon (2021) | Yes — printing and writing paper, expressly including newspapers and magazines; publisher is the producer | No exemption — the only US state fully obligating newspapers |
| California (2022) | No — packaging-only law | Outside scope |
| Maine (2021) | No — packaging material only | Outside scope |
| Colorado (2022) | Yes — paper products | Exempts paper "used for a print publication that primarily includes content derived from primary sources related to news and current events," plus bound books |
| Minnesota (2024) | Yes | Exempts newspapers (with news-content test) and news magazines with circulation under 95,000 |
| Washington (2025) | Yes | Exempts all newspapers, small news magazines, and copy paper (per legal analyses of the enacted bill) |
| Maryland (2025) | Yes | No newspaper exemption in the statute (per legal analyses) |
Two features of this table reward attention. First, the Colorado formulation travelled: the phrase "content derived from primary sources related to news and current events" reappears nearly verbatim in Minnesota and Washington — a template exemption propagating through the state legislative network, though who first drafted it is not documented. Second, the lobbying record is documented in Minnesota: the Minnesota Newspaper Association's letters and testimony argued that newspapers are 1.7% of municipal waste, recycled "at a rate of more than 64 percent, higher than any other product," and that compliance costs "would literally deprive residents of news and information" — and the exemption followed. Oregon and Maryland, the two states that obligate newspapers, mark the boundaries of what the same industry arguments achieved elsewhere.
4. Europe: the French test case¶
France ran the natural experiment on whether the in-kind compromise survives contact with EU law, and the sequence deserves precision because it is the best-documented episode in this literature (the account below follows the French Senate's committee report on the 2023 law).
France created a graphic-papers EPR scheme in 2006, extending it to press publications from January 2017. From 2015, statute (Article L. 541-10-19 of the environment code) let press publishers discharge their contribution in kind, through advertising space valued at 50% of rate card, conditional on environmental criteria (recycled-fibre minimums, limits on recycling-disrupting inks, transport-distance caps). The Senate report states the legal problem directly: the arrangement had become contrary to the amended Waste Framework Directive, which requires producers to bear real financial costs. The 2023 reform law — which merged the papers scheme into the packaging scheme (effective January 2024, under Citeo, covering graphic papers under 224 g/m², books excluded) — began in the National Assembly as a full removal of the press from EPR in exchange for a partnership convention providing free advertising to the State. The Senate rewrote it: the press stays in the merged scheme, but eco-organisations may grant primes (bonuses) to publications carrying public-interest information on waste prevention, via free informational inserts. The implementing decree (September 2023) then set the parameters: primes valued at 50% of rate card, capped at 20% of annual contribution for producers generally — but press publications may offset up to 100% of their contribution, meaning a compliant newspaper can still pay effectively zero cash.
The cost-shift, uniquely, was quantified in the French debate: local-government associations put the lost press contributions at €22–26 million per year, shifted onto packaging producers and municipalities within a merged scheme of roughly €950 million — with a deputy asking on the record, "Who will pay the 20 million euro bill left by the press?"
Elsewhere in Europe the pattern repeats in minor key. Finland runs a standalone paper producer-responsibility scheme dating to the 1990s, covering newspapers, magazines, office paper, catalogues and direct mail while excluding tissue, books and calendars — with the notable design choice that the obligation sits on paper mills and importers, not publishers: per the Finnish supervisory agency, the obligated producers are "professional importers of paper products and... manufacturers and importers of paper that is used in the manufacture of paper products." The choice dissolves the press-freedom objection at the definitional level — no newspaper pays anything as a newspaper; the fibre pays on its way into the press. Wallonia (Belgium) discharges the press sector's take-back obligation through negotiated environmental conventions under which publishers contribute primarily in advertising space, valued at 1.2 times the calculated waste-management costs, for regional waste-prevention campaigns, alongside paper-sourcing and eco-design commitments. The United Kingdom, by contrast, never posed the question: its packaging EPR obligates packaging only, and newspapers as products are out of scope by construction. And in Canada's Atlantic region, Nova Scotia's incoming program is reported to have adopted an in-kind newspaper arrangement on the established pattern — the instrument's sixth appearance.
5. The arguments, weighed¶
"Newspapers are not packaging." True and beside the point, on the inclusion logic: the obligation attaches to materials in the collectively managed stream, not to a moral category. Finland's design shows the objection can be accommodated without exemption — obligate the paper, not the publisher.
Press economics and the democratic function. The serious argument. Newsprint sits inside a declining industry performing a constitutionally valued function, and an EPR fee is, mechanically, a per-tonne cost on distribution. Governments have found three accommodations: exemption (Ontario, Colorado-family states), state assumption of the bill (Quebec 2019–24), and in-kind payment (BC, old France, Wallonia). Each preserves the collection service while moving its cost — to other producers, to taxpayers, or into advertising inventory whose real resource cost is opaque.
The in-kind pattern. The most striking regularity in this record: five jurisdictions independently converged on advertising space as the currency of newspaper compliance. It is politically elegant — no cash changes hands, governments gain communication channels, publishers avoid a line-item cost — and analytically dubious: the valuation is administered (50% of rate card in France; 1.2× costs in Wallonia), the benefit flows to governments rather than to the waste system bearing the costs, and the French episode establishes that EU law now regards it as failing the requirement that producers bear real financial costs.
The unmeasured question. No academic study quantifying the cost-shift from newspaper exemptions was located — the French parliamentary figure (€22–26M/year) is the only quantified estimate in the record. Every exemption reallocates the exempted tonnage's management costs to the remaining fee base; the amounts are calculable from existing program data and simply have not been published. This is a genuine gap, and a tractable one.
6. Where the argument stands¶
The record supports three conclusions. First, inclusion is the analytically coherent position: the material is in the stream, the costs are real, and the Finnish design shows the press-freedom objection can be met by moving the obligation up the supply chain rather than waiving it. Second, the exemptions are politics, and increasingly templated politics: the same industry, making the same arguments (small share, high recycling rate, civic function), has obtained exemption or subsidy in Ontario, Quebec, Colorado, Minnesota, Washington, France (economically), BC and Wallonia (via in-kind), with Oregon and Maryland the holdouts. Third, the in-kind instrument is living on borrowed time in Europe — the French reform preserved its economics through the prime mechanism while formally complying with EU law, a construction that invites the next challenge — while in North America, where no such supranational constraint exists, the Ontario-model exemption is spreading. The question the field cannot yet answer is the distributional one: what each exemption costs the producers who remain, a number no jurisdiction outside the French parliamentary debate has been willing to publish.
References¶
- B.C. Reg. 449/2004, Schedule 5 — paper product coverage and book exclusion; News Media Canada, BC stewardship plan annual reports (approved October 2017; figures from the 2019 report filed with the BC government).
- RPRA, Blue Box producer guidance — the 70% newspaper exemption test (rpra.ca, accessed August 2026); amending regulation O. Reg. 349/22 (2022); legal commentary (BLG/Mondaq) on the exemption's rationale and process. An early industry description of the exemption as two-year could not be reconciled with RPRA's current guidance, which states no sunset; RPRA's version is treated as controlling.
- RECYC-QUÉBEC, compensation-regime documentation (regime ended 31 December 2024); RecycleMédias tariff history and 2024–25 pre-budget submission; Québec government media-aid releases (2019–2022, cumulative $28.5M to RecycleMédias); the February 2026 open letter of Quebec newspapers and magazines (Hebdos Québec papers); reporting on magazine publishers' position (Grenier aux nouvelles).
- ORS 459A.863 and 459A.866 (Oregon); California PRC §42041; 38 M.R.S. §2146 (Maine); CRS 25-17-703 (Colorado); Minn. Stat. 115A.1441 (Minnesota); Washington E2SSB 5284 and Maryland SB 901 as analysed by Holland & Knight and Beveridge & Diamond (statutory text not independently pulled for WA/MD — noted).
- Minnesota Newspaper Association, letters and testimony on SF 3561 (February–March 2024, Minnesota legislative archive) — the documented US lobbying record.
- Sénat (France), Rapport n° 425 (2022-2023) on the law merging the packaging and papers schemes — the 2006/2017 scheme history, the L. 541-10-19 in-kind mechanism, its incompatibility with Directive 2018/851, and the Senate rewrite; Loi n° 2023-305 (24 April 2023); Citeo, on the merged scheme effective 1 January 2024; the September 2023 implementing decree's prime parameters and the €22–26M cost-shift estimates, as reported by Banque des Territoires.
- Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) — the Finnish paper scheme and its mill-level producer definition; Walloon environmental convention of 5 December 2013 (Moniteur belge) — the 1.2× in-kind arrangement. Current renewal status of the Belgian conventions not verified.
- US EPA, nondurable goods data — newspaper generation 2000–2018; PPEC — the Ontario 55%→23% newsprint share (industry source).
Verification note: this article rests on the August 2026 research pass; industry-sourced figures (PPEC, RecycleMédias, News Media Canada) are identified as such, secondary-only items are flagged, and the unresolved Quebec dispute is reported as unresolved. See Sources and method.