How are small producers and low-volume suppliers treated?¶
Every packaging EPR system faces the same arithmetic problem: the obligated population is dominated, in numbers, by companies whose packaging volumes are trivial, while the tonnage is dominated by a small number of large producers. Applying full registration, reporting, audit and fee machinery to a bakery that supplies a few hundred kilograms of paper bags a year imposes administrative costs that can exceed the fees collected — but every exemption shrinks the fee base, shifts costs onto the producers who remain, and creates boundary incentives at the threshold. This article surveys the small-producer thresholds actually in force across Canada, the United States and Europe — which vary far more than is generally appreciated, from Germany's explicit refusal to exempt anyone to revenue ceilings of five million dollars — and reviews the design trade-offs the variation reveals.
1. The problem the thresholds solve¶
The case for exemption is administrative economics. Registration, supply-data reporting, verification and fee administration have fixed costs per producer that do not scale down with volume; below some size, the system spends more processing a producer than the producer contributes. The regulator's caseload argument runs parallel: a registry of every pizzeria and craft seller is a registry the enforcement staff cannot police, and the documented state of EPR enforcement capacity — 71% of suspected free-rider cases shelved in Ontario, 262-day average enforcement lags (the capacity article) — makes prioritisation unavoidable in practice whatever the statute says.
The case against is threefold. Exemptions shrink the fee base while leaving the exempted packaging in the collection stream — someone still pays to manage it, namely the non-exempt producers. Thresholds create cliff effects: a producer crossing the line faces a discontinuous jump from zero obligation to full obligation, which rewards staying small, splitting entities, or under-reporting the measure the threshold uses. And revenue-based thresholds in particular exempt firms whose packaging footprint may not be small — revenue and packaging intensity correlate loosely, so a services firm with high revenue and negligible packaging pays while a low-margin, packaging-intensive small firm may not.
2. The thresholds in force¶
The variation across jurisdictions is wide enough that the table is the finding:
| Jurisdiction | Exemption basis | Threshold | Status of exempted producer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | None | — | "No de minimis threshold or exemption for companies with low packaging volumes" (ZSVR); all must register |
| Ontario | Revenue | < C$2M gross annual Ontario revenue | Exempt from all producer requirements |
| Ontario (2nd tier) | Tonnage by material | e.g. paper < 9,000 kg; rigid plastic < 2,000 kg; glass/metal/beverage < 1,000 kg | Exempt from collection/management duties; must still register and report |
| Quebec (ÉEQ) | Volume or sales | ≤ 1 tonne of targeted materials, or ≤ C$1M Quebec sales, or single point of sale < 929 m² with < $1M sales | Exempt from payment and reporting |
| Quebec (2nd tier) | Flat fees | 1–15 t: bands from C$1,010 (1–2.5 t) to C$6,120 (10–15 t), 2024 schedule | Flat contribution instead of itemised declaration |
| British Columbia | Volume or revenue | < 1 tonne PPP or < C$1M revenue (2014 amendment); low-volume flat-fee options above that | Exempt; flat fees for 1–15 t bands |
| California | Sales | < US$1M gross annual sales (by application, under the 2026 regulations, 14 CCR §18980.5.2) | Exempt from most reporting and fee requirements |
| Oregon | Seven pathways | Nonprofits; public bodies; < US$5M gross revenue; < 1 t covered products into Oregon; < 5 t for beverage-container manufacturers; restaurants/food carts; single-outlet retailers with no online sales | Exempt from PRO membership and fees |
| Colorado | Revenue or volume | < US$5M gross revenue or < 1 ton covered materials (as reported in legal summaries) | Exempt |
| Maryland | Volume or revenue | < 1 ton statewide or < US$2M global revenue (as reported in legal analyses) | Exempt |
| UK | Turnover and tonnage bands | Small: £1–2M turnover with > 25 t, or > £1M with 25–50 t. Large: ≥ £2M and > 50 t. Below £1M or ≤ 25 t: out of scope | Small organisations report data only — no disposal fees; large pay everything |
| France (Citeo) | Units | < 10,000 consumer sales units/year | €80 flat-rate declaration (forfait) |
(Figures verified against regulator or PRO guidance as of August 2026 except where noted as reported from legal summaries; the Quebec flat-fee amounts are the 2024 schedule. Sources in the reference list.)
3. Four design families¶
The table sorts into four approaches, each with a distinct logic.
The German refusal. Germany exempts no one from registration: the register exists precisely to make the obligated population visible, and a de minimis threshold would re-open the free-rider door the register was built to close. The burden on genuinely tiny producers is managed through the market instead — compliance can be purchased cheaply through any dual system — rather than through exemption. The cost is a register carrying hundreds of thousands of entries; the benefit is that "unregistered" and "non-compliant" mean the same thing in Germany, which is exactly what makes marketplace enforcement workable (the definitions article).
The exemption cliff. Most North American programs simply exempt below a line — with the cliff problems that follow. Ontario's design is notable for using Ontario revenue (not global), so a multinational with modest Ontario sales could in principle fall under the line while a purely local mid-sized firm does not; California's 2026 regulations made its US$1M exemption application-based rather than automatic, adding a gatekeeping step; Oregon's seven pathways go furthest in exempting categories — every nonprofit, every restaurant, every single-outlet retailer without online sales — a set of political economy choices as much as administrative ones, which removes whole constituencies from the fee base regardless of their packaging volumes.
The graduated ladder. The UK builds a middle tier rather than a cliff: "small organisations" (roughly £1–2M turnover or 25–50 tonnes) must collect and report packaging data but pay no disposal fees, while "large organisations" (≥ £2M and > 50 tonnes) carry the full obligation. The design purchases something subtle: the reporting tier keeps mid-sized producers visible to the system — building the data foundation and habituating firms to compliance — before money is at stake, and it halves the cliff by splitting "report" from "pay."
The flat fee. Quebec, British Columbia and France convert small producers' obligations into fixed payments — Quebec's bands running from C$1,010 to C$6,120 across the 1–15 tonne range, France's forfait a nominal €80 for producers under 10,000 sales units. The flat fee is best understood as pricing participation rather than tonnage: it keeps small producers inside the system (registered, countable, contributing something) while replacing per-material declaration machinery — whose cost would exceed the fee — with a single payment. Its weakness is calibration drift: a flat band is regressive at its bottom and a bargain at its top, and the bands need periodic maintenance the tariff-setters may not prioritise.
4. What the variation does at the borders¶
Because the thresholds differ this much, the same company can be exempt in one jurisdiction, flat-fee'd in a second, reporting-only in a third and fully obligated in a fourth — a multi-state US retailer near the various lines faces exactly this. Three consequences deserve notice.
The cost-shift is real but rarely quantified. Exempted packaging remains in the bin; its management costs flow to the non-exempt fee base. No jurisdiction publishes an estimate of the tonnage or cost share represented by exempted producers — a small but genuine instance of the field's general measurement gap, and one that matters for fairness claims: the breadth of Oregon-style categorical exemptions, in particular, is an unmeasured transfer from large producers to restaurants, nonprofits and small retail.
Thresholds interact with the free-rider problem. A regulator investigating an unregistered producer must first establish that it is obligated — which, under revenue thresholds, means establishing its revenue, information the regulator typically lacks. Exemption lines thereby convert enforcement questions into investigations of firm size, adding a step to exactly the caseload that Ontario's Auditor General found being shelved. Germany's no-threshold rule, whatever its administrative cost, eliminates this step entirely.
The measure chosen matters more than the level. Revenue thresholds (Ontario, California, Oregon's $5M pathway) are administrable — firms know their revenue — but track packaging poorly. Tonnage thresholds (the 1-tonne tests in Quebec, Oregon, Colorado, Maryland; Ontario's material-specific second tier) track the actual externality but require the small producer to weigh its packaging to learn whether it is exempt, which partly defeats the simplification purpose. The dual-test designs (either/or in Quebec, BC, Colorado, Maryland) exempt the union of both groups — the most generous choice — while the UK's conjunctive test for full obligation (turnover and tonnage) obligates only the intersection.
Ontario's two-tier design deserves separate note as the most differentiated in North America. Below C$2 million in Ontario revenue, a producer is exempt from everything. Above that line, a second, material-specific tier applies: producers supplying less than a stated tonnage of a given material — 9,000 kg of paper, 2,000 kg of rigid or flexible plastic, 1,000 kg of glass, metal or beverage containers — are exempt from the collection and management obligations for that material but must still register and report. The design implicitly adopts the registration-payment separation argued for below: small suppliers stay visible in the data while being spared the performance machinery. Its complication is that a producer can be simultaneously obligated for one material and tier-exempt for another, multiplying classification work — the price of precision.
Definitional and threshold divergence compounds for multi-jurisdiction producers. A firm selling across Canada and the United States faces, simultaneously, an Ontario-revenue test, a Quebec sales-or-tonnage-or-floor-area test, a BC volume-or-revenue test, and seven different US regimes ranging from Oregon's categorical pathways to Maryland's dual test — with the measures defined on different bases (provincial versus global revenue; calendar versus fiscal years; metric tonnes versus tons). No two thresholds match. For the mid-sized producer near several lines at once, determining whether it is obligated in each jurisdiction can cost more than the fees themselves — a compliance burden invisible in any single jurisdiction's design discussion and substantial in aggregate.
5. Where the argument stands¶
The small-producer question is genuinely hard, and the honest synthesis is that the field has converged on the need for proportionality without converging on its form. Four propositions are defensible on the record.
A preliminary observation frames all four: nobody knows how much the exemptions exempt. No jurisdiction publishes the number of producers below its thresholds, the tonnage they collectively supply, or the fee revenue forgone — the exempted population is, by construction, invisible to registries built around the obligated one. Ontario's 1,918 registered Blue Box producers (the verification article) sit above a C$2 million line beneath which an uncounted population supplies an unmeasured tonnage. The design debate below is therefore conducted, everywhere, without the one number that would discipline it: what proportionality actually costs.
First, some proportionality mechanism is universal in practice — even Germany, which refuses exemption, achieves proportionality through cheap market compliance rather than through the register. The debate is about form, not existence.
Second, graduated designs dominate cliffs on the merits. The UK's report-only tier and the Quebec/BC/France flat-fee ladders preserve visibility and habit at low cost; pure exemption cliffs purchase administrative relief at the price of invisibility, boundary gaming and a harder enforcement problem.
Third, exemptions are transfers and should be accounted as such. The exempted tonnage's management costs do not disappear; they move to the remaining fee base. A jurisdiction that published even a rough annual estimate of exempted tonnage would make the trade-off it has chosen visible — none currently does.
Fourth, registration and payment should be separated. The strongest lesson across the designs is that the register's completeness has public value independent of fee collection: it defines the obligated population, enables marketplace enforcement, and makes free-riding measurable. Exempting small producers from payment is defensible economics; exempting them from existence in the system — as the cliff designs do — sacrifices the information foundation for modest additional relief. Germany and the UK, from opposite ends of the burden spectrum, both got this right; the North American cliff designs mostly did not.
References¶
- ZSVR (Germany), official guidance: registration obligation and the absence of any de minimis threshold (verpackungsregister.org, accessed August 2026). Quoted in Sections 2–3.
- RPRA (Ontario), Blue Box producer guidance: the C$2M Ontario-revenue exemption and material-specific tonnage tiers (rpra.ca, accessed August 2026).
- Éco Entreprises Québec, small-business reporting guide: the 1-tonne / C$1M / 929 m² exemption tests and the 2024 flat-fee schedule (eeq.ca, accessed August 2026). The regulatory versus tariff-schedule location of these thresholds was not confirmed.
- British Columbia: 2014 amendment to the Recycling Regulation relieving producers under 1 tonne or C$1M revenue (official news release 2014ENV0037-000702); Recycle BC producer FAQs on low-volume and flat-fee options.
- CalRecycle, SB 54 exemptions and exclusions page: the US$1M application-based exemption under 14 CCR §18980.5.2 (accessed August 2026). Whether "gross sales" is California-only or global was not confirmed.
- ORS 459A.863(32) (Oregon) — the seven small-producer pathways, verified against the statute text.
- Colorado HB22-1355 and Maryland SB 901 thresholds — as reported in legal summaries (Printing United; Beveridge & Diamond); primary statutory text not independently verified.
- GOV.UK, "Extended producer responsibility for packaging: who is affected and what to do" — the small/large organisation bands and their obligations (accessed August 2026).
- Citeo, simplified declaration guidance: the 10,000-unit threshold and €80 forfait (citeo.com, accessed August 2026). Current-year forfait amount not confirmed against the 2026 tariff document.
Verification note: thresholds are quoted from regulator and PRO guidance current at August 2026; items resting on secondary legal summaries are flagged in-line and in the references. See Sources and method.