[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) shifts the cost of end-of-life collection and recycling from municipalities and taxpayers onto the companies that put products and packaging on the market. The point is leverage: the producer is the only party that chooses the material and design, so putting the disposal cost on them is the intervention closest to the source. As of 2026 several US states including California, Oregon, Maine, and Colorado have passed packaging EPR laws, following decades of use in the EU. The open questions are how fees are set, whether they actually change packaging design or just get passed to consumers, and how to measure real recycling rather than collection. Seeded from Recycling.